The best kind of giving is thanksgiving.
They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind.
There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.
Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.
Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.
If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only instinct I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as the sin of avarice.
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”
It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
There is no bigot like the atheist.
The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.
There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.
I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.
Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.
A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.
All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.