The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.