Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it’s a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
If you know what a man’s doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he’s doing keep behind him.
If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.
Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass.
The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.
Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.
Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.
A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.
When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
Plato was right, but not quite right.
It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.
Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.
For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
Comradeship is obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection; it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal.
Odd, isn’t it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.