Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God.
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
As if everyone did not know that while saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean.
It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus.
Do you know what that means?” he cried. “It means that God himself may hold a candle to show me your infernal face.
I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it’s a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.
The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature.
How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?
A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness.
For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them.
If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, ‘It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.
Ubi Petrus ibi Franciscus.
No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.
Perhaps I might put up my notice of warning, and warn the reader not to read the second chapter. Now I come to think of it, I might warn him not to read the book at all.
The great march of metal destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is the reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake.
When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That.
A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant.
In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?” But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact.