What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?

Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.

There are no social differences – till women come in.

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.

Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.

Life falls into place only with God.

A young mistress is better than an old master.

I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion

This blessed gift of smoking!

Countless people…will hate the New World Order…and will die protesting against it…we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents.

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go….We are living in the end of the sovereign states….In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish….Countless people…will hate the new world order….and will die protesting against it.

Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness…. Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile…. Not a single one but has at some time wept.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast – is choice.

The cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone, but, the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.

Strength is the outcome of need.

Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end.

If your life doesn’t end in failure, you haven’t reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world.

Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.

To be honest, one must be inconsistent.

The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it….Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity.

If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.

It was tough going. His world was in the grips of the last Ice Age. In Southern Africa it was drier than now, water was difficult to obtain and so were animals.

It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

We learn from failure, not from success.

Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

The only true way to understand Life is to live it yourself.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

A downtrodden class… will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.

For after the Battle comes quiet.

The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.

Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically united To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives.

The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world.

Ignorance is not an extension of time.

Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

If the world does not please you, you can change it.

It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!

There’s this idle feeling that settles when the day’s work is done and you just want to ride around on a bike. That’s the time for sex.

In these undiscovered books on the shelf there are marvels, miracles!

Inside these old forgotten books on shelves are wonders, miracles!

Hunger makes a fool of a man.

Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man.

I write to cover a frame of ideas.

All passion is madness.

.Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe .

The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.

What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the dark?

She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.

For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

They haven’t any spirit in them – no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.

The stranger swore briefly but vividly.

There’s some ex-traordinary things in books,” said the mariner.

You may kill me, but I can hold you – and all the universe for that matter – in the grip of this small brain. I would not change. Even now.

There was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked.

We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be.

I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

In England, we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

Some people bear three kinds of trouble – the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.

To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man — the mystery, the power, the freedom.

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.

The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it’s heart.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.