299 quotes
If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
The Thing (1929)
It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
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 Club of Queer Trades (1905)
The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives.
The Defendant (1901)
Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas ... for it is the assertion of a universal negative
Five Types: A Book of Essays (1911)
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
Poems (1917)
[Dickens] was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill.
Charles Dickens (1906)
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
The Flying Inn (1914)
About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity.
The Everlasting Man (1925)
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
The Dagger with Wings (1926)
He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.
Poems (1917)
A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
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.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1933)
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
Twelve Types (1903)
I’ll read "Jack Redskin on the Quest"
And feed my brain with better things.
Poems (1917)
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the cash that goes therewith!
But the souls of Christian peoples...
Chuck it, Smith!
Poems (1917)
We all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see them either in a murder or in a valentine.
George Bernard Shaw (1909)
The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
Tolstoy (1903)