The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.
If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other – the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.
Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.
There nearly always is a method in madness.
When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.
If you’d take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it might.
Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?
If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.
The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don’t often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way.