29 quotes
When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: "My dear, we live in an age of transition."
Assessments and Anticipations (1929)
Racialism is a superstitious variety of nationalism. A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.
The End of an Age, and Other Essays (1948)
I believe that the accumulated experience of mankind, and his wonderful discoveries, are of great value. I only point out that they do not constitute real-progress in human nature itself,...
Outspoken Essays (1919)
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
Outspoken Essays (1919)
The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings.
Christian Mysticism (1899)
What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostly uncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.
The End of an Age, and Other Essays (1948)
The old civilisation, with all the brilliant qualities which make many moderns regret its destruction, rested on too narrow a base. The woman and the slave were left out, the woman especially by the Greeks, and the slave by the Romans.
St Paul (1914)
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
Misattributed to Inge in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)