Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

Gluttony is a great fault; but we do not necessarily dislike a glutton. We only dislike the glutton when he becomes a gourmet-that is, we only dislike him when he not only wants the best for himself, but knows what is best for other people.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.

The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

I am at one with my duality.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological, and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilization. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralyzed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either.

He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

Progress is the mother of all problems.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

Hell is God’s great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

There are many ways to fall down, but there’s only one way to stand up straight.

Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

Men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

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.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.

Theology is only thought applied to religion.

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

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.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

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

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.

Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

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.

It is terrible to consider how few politicians are hanged.

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

Where move in strange Communion the Million Masks of God.

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

The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right: It is the ideal American who is all wrong.

The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.

Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

Here ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?

This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

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.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

The prime truth of woman, the universal mother…that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Paradox has been defined as Truth standing on her head to get attention.

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

The truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality.

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.

The world will never starve for want of wonders but only for the want of wonder.

There is nothing wrong with electricity; nothing except that modern man is not a god who holds the thunderbolts but a savage who is struck by lightning.

To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

We talk about life as being dull as ditchwater, but is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

“Divine discontent” We have come to the wrong star…That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.

A man knocking on the door of the brothel is knocking for God.

The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

You say grace before meals. 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.

Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.

There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

Journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Honor is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall porters.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.

Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.

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

There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Half a truth is better than no politics.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin.

Pride juggles with her toppling towers, They strike the sun and cease, But the firm feet of humility They grip the ground like trees.

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.

You’ll never find the solution if you don’t see the problem.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all seasick.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Jesus promised his disciples three things – that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

There is only one thing certain and that is that nothing is certain.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

All government is an ugly necessity.

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

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

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

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

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

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

It is always the secure who are humble.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.

Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

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

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.