But it’s my reading of human nature that a man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby.
We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares.
Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.
A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.
You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.
His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive.
One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.
Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.
Intelligent people have a strong objection to things that mean nothing at all.
The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method. But.
He who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the rejection of almost everything.
Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.
Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself.
The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world.
The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver.
He felt strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things.
We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.