The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.
It’s not the world that’s got so much worse but the news coverage that’s got so much better.
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.
Nobody notices postmen, yet they have passions like other men.
Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it, And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.
A faith is that which is able to survive a mood.
CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.
What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards.
To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.
The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.
I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.