I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.
The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.
I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.
When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.
Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.
The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it.
Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.
Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.
There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.