Marriage isn’t what it was. It’s become a different thing because women have become human beings.
A young mistress is better than an old master.
The army ages men sooner than the law and philosophy; it exposes them more freely to germs, which undermine and destroy, and it shelters them more completely from thought, which stimulates and preserves.
We’re in a blessed drainpipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.
An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.
It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.
If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters.
For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don’t give a damn.
But I was too restless to watch long; I’m too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours – that’s another matter.
Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything.
I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.
It’s no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.
The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.
The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
Alone – it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.
Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.
We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.
It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.