Life is indeed terribly complicated – to a man who has lost his principles.
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.
The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.
I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.
I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.
Paradox – Truth standing on her head to get attention.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.
People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.
The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully interferes.
Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.
No man knows he is young while he is young.
Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.
We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.
If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.