Quotes

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

"My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober".

Law, when it ceases to be justice, ceases even to be law.

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

[on loyalty] We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

[on neighbors] We make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor.

It is terrible to consider how few politicians are hanged.

Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.

Men are men, but Man is a Woman.

The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.

Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.

Never tear down a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place

Where move in strange Communion the Million Masks of God.

I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

Children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

Thanks are the highest form of thought, and gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

We must not hate humanity or despise humanity or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity, in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

Plato was right, but not quite right.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

Fine weather encourages individualism. When the whole glittering landscape is cut out as clear as a map-indented by the blue sky as by a blue sea, then each one of us wishes to take his own way, to walk by himself along the roads of the world and conquer for himself the cities of the morning. In the sunlight a man asks for liberty, which is only the divine name for loneliness. But it is in black and bleak conditions that we learn that it is not well for man to be alone; and festivity was discovered in the darkness. Winter encourages that thing called comradeship which modern humanitarians so often seem unable to understand, but which Walt Whitman so wisely perceived to be the permanent foundation of democracy.

A stiff apology is a second insult.

Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

Ritual is a need of the human soul - nay, it is rather a need of the human body, like exercise. A man does not take off his hat to a lady because he looks nicer without it; the instance of bald men would be alone sufficient to upset such an explanation. He does it because you must positively do something when you meet a lady, or your whole civilization goes to pieces; and taking off your hat is easier than taking off your necktie or lying face downwards on the pavement.

Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better.

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.

Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.

A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back.

When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

Art is the signature of man.