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.