It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.
Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.
Humility is the mother of giants.
There are no new ideas.
A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.
I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.
The more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.
Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
The test of happiness is gratitude.
It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.
The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones, and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.
Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?
But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.
Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.
Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses.
Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.