Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.
Dog doesn’t eat dog, and doctors don’t bite doctors, not even when they are mad doctors. I shouldn’t care to cast any reflection on my eminent predecessor in Potter’s Pond, if I could avoid it;.
St. Thomas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect. Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies.
If you asked one of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan, for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have answered, with tears, that he was as weak as water. And because of this he would have borne tortures.
He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.
And Right and Left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.
People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children;.
Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.
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. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast.
Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. Because he bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that holds the roof over his head. he industriously removes the obstacle; and in return the obstacle removes him; and much more valuable things than he.
There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end.
Every man is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man.
Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies.
I really have no experience,” he began. “No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of Armageddon.” “But I am really unfit – ” “You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown. “Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.” “I do,” said the other – “martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.
Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.
The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population ; or if he is not, how he knows he is not.
It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.
He had escaped a thunderbolt, but he was still under a cloud.
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation.