The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.
Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.
It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.
Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
Passion makes every detail important.
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.
Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.
When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.
A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.
When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.
There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.
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