No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.
If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only instinct I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as the sin of avarice.
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”
It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.
There is no bigot like the atheist.
The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.
There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.
I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.
Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.
A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.
All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.
We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.
When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any.
Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.
The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.
When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.