299 quotes
They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.
The Meaning of the Crusade (1920)
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
Charles Dickens (1906)
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
All Things Considered (1908)
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath,
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
Poems (1917)
I realized that ritual will always mean throwing away something; Destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
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.
I am not sure that the old great lady who could only smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can only stammer American.
What's Wrong with the World (1910)
Don John of Austria is going to the war.
Poems (1917)
It is always the secure who are humble.
The Defendant (1901)
The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world.
Charles Dickens (1906)
A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy.
The Everlasting Man (1925)
He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news.
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes.
The Defendant (1901)
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.
In The Illustrated London News (1924)
There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
The Flying Inn (1914)
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. 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?
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are — of immeasurable stature.
The Defendant (1901)
There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in Santa Claus at a discreditably early age.
George Bernard Shaw (1909)
It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was bound to choose the smallest piece.
What I Saw in America (1922)