Self is the gorgon.
We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world.
The hardest thing to remember about our time, of course, is simply that it is a time- we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment.
We are talking about an artist; What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.
No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating and drinking.
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
Thrift is poetic because it is creative.
Modesty is always beautiful.
The secret of life lies in laughter and humility.
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening “Do it again” to the moon.
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.
Before we congratulate ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are we without the fault because we have the opposite virtue? Or are we without the fault because we have the opposite fault?
For these disguises did not disguise, but reveal.
There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in a workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.
When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.
The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.
It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity.
The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.
In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation – it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.