Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.
Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.
Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.
Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.
The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.
I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.
Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.
The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.