A third-class carriage is a community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits.
Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”
The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.
There is only one reason an intelligent person doesn’t believe in miracles. He or she believes in materialism.
Every true artist feels that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.
Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.