It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don’t often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way.
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
The classes that wash most are those that work least.
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.
But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.
Only poor men get hanged.
The ignorant pronounce it Frood To cavil or applaud The well-informed pronounce it Froyd But I pronounce it Fraud.
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.
The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.
I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.
In anything that does cover the whole of your life – in your philosophy and your religion – you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.