The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones – but that’s why it’s so important to confess them.
Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing.
Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.
I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone.
It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.
I suppose that St. George is our own original St. George, who killed the Dragon and afterwards married the grand lady. In many of the marriages of grand ladies, however, which take place in this parish, the preliminary ceremony of the gentleman killing a dragon is often omitted. I am against all this dropping of the full formalities.
Eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a thousand people or applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning.
I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.
Go on,” said the priest very gently. “We are only trying to find the truth. What are you afraid of?” “I am afraid of finding it,” said Flambeau.
The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the State.
The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not ‘artists,’ the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face – that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.
All women dress to be noticed: gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith.
And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.
Now nobody will begin to understand Thomas philosophy, or indeed Catholic philosophy, who does not realize that the primary and fundamental part of it is entirely the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the creator of the world.
There are some refusals which, though they may be done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young mothers when their husbands were in the field against us. Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.
Telling the truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the ethics of honesty.
All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere existence of their neighbours.
It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.
For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few sad and certain things.