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.
Life is indeed terribly complicated – to a man who has lost his principles.
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.
The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.