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The Modern Mind Will Accept Nothing On Authority, But Will Accept Anything On No Authority. Say That The Bible Or The Pope Says So And It Will Be Dismissed Without Further Examination. But Preface Your Remark With "i Think I Heard Somewhere," Or, Try But Fail To Remember The Name Of Some Professor Who Might Have Said "such-and-such," And It Will Be Immediately Accepted As An Unshakable Fact.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The Modern Mind Will

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The Modern Mind Will Accept Nothing On Authority, But Will Accept Anything On No Authority. Say That The Bible Or The Pope Says So And It Will Be Dismissed Without Further Examination. But Preface Your Remark With "i Think I Heard Somewhere," Or, Try But Fail To Remember The Name Of Some Professor Who Might Have Said "such-and-such," And It Will Be Immediately Accepted As An Unshakable Fact.

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It Is Not Merely True That A Creed Unites Men. Nay, A Difference Of Creed Unites Men - So Long As It Is A Clear Difference. A Boundary Unites. Many A Magnanimous Moslem And Chivalrous Crusader Must Have Been Nearer To Each Other, Because They Were Both Dogmatists, Than Any Two Agnostics. "i Say God Is One," And "i Say God Is One But Also Three," That Is The Beginning Of A Good Quarrelsome, Manly Friendship.

It Has Been Left To The Last Christians, Or Rather To The First Christians Fully Committed To Blaspheming And Denying Christianity, To Invent A New Kind Of Worship Of Sex, Which Is Not Even A Worship Of Life. It Has Been Left To The Very Latest Modernists To Proclaim An Erotic Religion Which At Once Exalts Lust And Forbids Fertility . . . The New Priests Abolish The Fatherhood And Keep The Feast - To Themselves.

Puritanism Was An Honourable Mood; It Was A Noble Fad. In Other Words, It Was A Highly Creditable Mistake.

A Man Cannot Be Wise Enough To Be A Great Artist Without Being Wise Enough To Wish To Be A Philosopher.

The Lunatic Is The Man Who Lives In A Small World But Thinks It Is A Large One; He Is The Man Who Lives In A Tenth Of The Truth, And Thinks It Is The Whole. The Madman Cannot Conceive Any Cosmos Outside A Certain Tale Or Conspiracy Or Vision.

The Coziness Between Church And State Is Good For The State And Bad For The Church

Church And State

The Only Words That Ever Satisfied Me As Describing Nature Are The Terms Used In Fairy Books, Charm, Spell, Enchantment; They Express The Arbitrariness Of The Fact And Its Mystery.

The Atheist Is Not Interested In Anything Except Attacks On Atheism.

To Do Mohammed Justice, His Main Attack Was Against The Idolatries Of Asia. Only He Thought, Just As The Arians Did And Just As The Unitarians Do, That He Could Attack Them Better With A Greater Approximation To Plain Theism. What Distinguishes His Heresy From Anything Like An Arian Or Albigensian Heresy Is That, As It Sprang Up On The Borders Of Christendom, It Could Spread Outwards To A Barbaric World.

The Modern World Is A Crowd Of Very Rapid Racing Cars All Brought To A Standstill And Stuck In A Block Of Traffic.

He Is Only A Very Shallow Critic Who Cannot See An Eternal Rebel In The Heart Of The Conservative.

The Voice Of The Special Rebels And Prophets, Recommending Discontent, Should, As I Have Said, Sound Now And Then Suddenly, Like A Trumpet. But The Voices Of The Saints And Sages, Recommending Contentment, Should Sound Unceasingly, Like The Sea.

Earnest Freethinkers Need Not Worry Themselves So Much About The Persecutions Of The Past. Before The Liberal Idea Is Dead Or Triumphant We Shall See Wars And Persecutions The Like Of Which The World Has Never Seen.

...a Figure Of Speech Can Often Get Into A Crack Too Small For A Definition.

So Far As A Man May Be Proud Of A Religion Rooted In Humility, I Am Very Proud Of My Religion; I Am Especially Proud Of Those Parts Of It That Are Most Commonly Called Superstition. I Am Proud Of Being Fettered By Antiquated Dogmas And Enslaved By Dead Creeds (as My Journalistic Friends Repeat With So Much Pertinacity), For I Know Very Well That It Is The Heretical Creeds That Are Dead, And That It Is Only The Reasonable Dogma That Lives Long Enough To Be Called Antiquated.

A Madman Is Not Someone Who Has Lost His Reason But Someone Who Has Lost Everything But His Reason

Lost Everything

Men Always Talk About The Most Important Things To Perfect Strangers. In The Perfect Stranger We Perceive Man Himself; The Image Of A God Is Not Disguised By Resemblances To An Uncle Or Doubts Of Wisdom Of A Mustache.

It Is Hard To Make Government Representative When It Is Also Remote.

Representatives

Doing Nothing Is Sometimes One Of The Highest Of The Duties Of Man.

Every Heresy Has Been An Effort To Narrow The Church.

It Seems A Pity That Psychology Has Destroyed All Our Knowledge Of Human Nature.

There Should Be A Burnished Tablet Let Into The Ground On The Spot Where Some Courageous Man First Ate Stilton Cheese, And Survived.

A Great Deal Of Contemporary Criticism Reads To Me Like A Man Saying, 'of Course I Do Not Like Green Cheese. I Am Very Fond Of Brown Sherry.

Well, If I Am Not Drunk, I Am Mad," Replied Syme With Perfect Calm; "but I Trust I Can Behave Like A Gentleman In Either Condition.

Every One On This Earth Should Believe, Amid Whatever Madness Or Moral Failure, That His Life And Temperament Have Some Object On The Earth. Every One On The Earth Should Believe That He Has Something To Give To The World Which Cannot Otherwise Be Given.

It Is True That There Is A Thing Crudely Called Charity, Which Means Charity To The Deserving Poor; But Charity To The Deserving Is Not Charity At All, But Justice. It Is The Undeserving Who Require It, And The Ideal Either Does Not Exist At All, Or Exists Wholly For Them.

And My Haunting Instinct That Somehow Good Was Not Merely A Tool To Be Used, But A Relic To Be Guarded, Like The Goods From Crusoe's Ship--even That Had Been The Wild Whisper Of Something Originally Wise, For, According To Christianity, We Were Indeed The Survivors Of A Wreck, The Crew Of A Golden Ship That Had Gone Down Before The Beginning Of The World.

Truth Can Understand Error, But Error Cannot Understand Truth.

Man Must Have Just Enough Faith In Himself To Have Adventures, And Just Enough Doubt Of Himself To Enjoy Them.

Now, Among The Heresies That Are Spoken In This Matter Is The Habit Of Calling A Grey Day A "colourless" Day. Grey Is A Colour, And Can Be A Very Powerful And Pleasing Colour.... A Grey Clouded Sky Is Indeed A Canopy Between Us And The Sun; So Is A Green Tree, If It Comes To That. But The Grey Umbrellas Differ As Much As The Green In Their Style And Shape, In Their Tint And Tilt. One Day May Be Grey Like Steel, And Another Grey Like Dove’s Plumage. One May Seem Grey Like The Deathly Frost, And Another Grey Like The Smoke Of Substantial Kitchens.

Music With Dinner Is An Insult Both To The Cook And The Violinist.

Now It Has Appeared To Me Unfair That Humanity Should Be Engaged Perpetually In Calling All Those Things Bad Which Have Been Good Enough To Make Other Things Better, In Everlastingly Kicking Down The Ladder By Which It Has Climbed. It Has Appeared To Me That Progress Should Be Something Else Besides A Continual Parricide; Therefore I Have Investigated The Dust-heaps Of Humanity, And Found A Treasure In All Of Them. I Have Found That Humanity Is Not Incidentally Engaged, But Eternally And Systematically Engaged, In Throwing Gold Into The Gutter And Diamonds Into The Sea.

An Enormous Amount Of Modern Ingenuity Is Expended On Finding Defences For The Indefensible Conduct Of The Powerful. As I Have Said Above, These Defences Generally Exhibit Themselves Most Emphatically In The Form Of Appeals To Physical Science. And Of All The Forms In Which Science, Or Pseudo-science, Has Come To The Rescue Of The Rich And Stupid, There Is None So Singular As The Singular Invention Of The Theory Of Races.

We Can Be Almost Certain Of Being Wrong About The Future, If We Are Wrong About The Past.

If A Man Would Make His World Large, He Must Be Always Making Himself Small.

Why Should Anything Go Right; Even Observation And Deduction? Why Should Not Good Logic Be As Misleading As Bad Logic? They Are Both Movements In The Brain Of A Bewildered Ape?

Architecture Is The Alphabet Of Giants; It Is The Largest Set Of Symbols Ever Made To Meet The Eyes Of Men. A Tower Stands Up Like A Sort Of Simplified Stature, Of Much More Than Heroic Size.

The More We Are Proud That The Bethlehem Story Is Plain Enough To Be Understood By The Shepherds, And Almost By The Sheep, The More Do We Let Ourselves Go, In Dark And Gorgeous Imaginative Frescoes Or Pageants About The Mystery And Majesty Of The Three Magian Kings.

My Brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, Was Born When I Was About Five Years Old; And, After A Brief Pause, Began To Argue. He Continued To Argue To The End. I Am Glad To Think That Through All Those Years We Never Stopped Arguing; And We Never Once Quarreled. Perhaps The Principal Objection To A Quarrel Is That It Interrupts An Argument.

When You Break The Big Laws, You Do Not Get Liberty; You Do Not Even Get Anarchy. You Get The Small Laws.

No Man Can Be Merry Unless He Is Serious.

Angels Can Fly Because They Take Themselves Lightly. Never Forget That The Devil Fell By Force Of Gravity. He Who Has The Faith Has The Fun.

A Really Great Person Is The Person Who Makes Every Person Feel Great.

I Represent The Jolly Mass Of Mankind. I Am The Happy And Reckless Christian.

Christianity Got Over The Difficulty Of Combining Furious Opposites, By Keeping Them Both, And Keeping Them Both Furious.

A Beetle May Or May Not Be Inferior To A Man - The Matter Awaits Demonstration; But If He Were Inferior By Ten Thousand Fathoms, The Fact Remains That There Is Probably A Beetle View Of Things Of Which A Man Is Entirely Ignorant. If He Wishes To Conceive That Point Of View, He Will Scarcely Reach It By Persistently Revelling In The Fact That He Is Not A Beetle.

It Is Better To Speak Wisdom Foolishly Like The Saints Than To Speak Folly Wisely Like The Deans.

Great Truths Can Only Be Forgotten And Can Never Be Falsified.

There Are Two Kinds Of Charlatan: The Man Who Is Called A Charlatan, And The Man Who Really Is One. The First Is The Quack Who Cures You; The Second Is The Highly Qualified Person Who Doesn't.

No Animal Ever Invented Anything As Bad As Drunkenness - Or So Good As Drink.

Our Civilization Has Decided That Determining The Guilt Or Innocence Of Men Is A Thing Too Important To Be Trusted To Trained Men. When It Wants A Library Catalogued, Or The Solar System Discovered, Or Any Trifle Of That Kind, It Uses Up Its Specialists. But When It Wishes Anything Done Which Is Really Serious, It Collects Twelve Of The Ordinary Men Standing Round. The Same Thing Was Done, If I Remember Right, By The Founder Of Christianity.

I Think The Oddest Thing About The Advanced People Is That, While They Are Always Talking About Things As Problems, They Have Hardly Any Notion Of What A Real Problem Is.

The Modern World Is Filled With Men Who Hold Dogmas So Strongly That They Do Not Even Know They Are Dogmas.

No Man Must Be Superior To The Things That Are Common To Men.... Not Only Are We All In The Same Boat, But We Are All Seasick.

We Are To Regard Existence As A Raid Or Great Adventure; It Is To Be Judged, Therefore, Not By What Calamities It Encounters, But By What Flag It Follows And What High Town It Assaults. The Most Dangerous Thing In The World Is To Be Alive; One Is Always In Danger Of One's Life. But Anyone Who Shrinks From That Is A Traitor To The Great Scheme And Experiment Of Being.

Jokes Are Generally Honest. Complete Solemnity Is Always Dishonest.

(tradition) Is The Democracy Of The Dead.

Be Careful How You Suggest Things To Me. For There Is In Me A Madness Which Goes Beyond Martyrdom, The Madness Of An Utterly Idle Man.

Art Is Limitation; The Essence Of Every Picture Is The Frame. If You Draw A Giraffe, You Must Draw Him With A Long Neck. If In Your Bold Creative Way You Hold Yourself Free To Draw A Giraffe With A Short Neck, You Will Really Find That You Are Not Free To Draw A Giraffe.

If A Rhinoceros Were To Enter This Restaurant Now, There Is No Denying He Would Have Great Power Here. But I Should Be The First To Rise And Assure Him That He Had No Authority Whatever.

If You Spell A Word Wrong You Have Some Temptation To Think It Wrong.

Reason Is Always A Kind Of Brute Force; Those Who Appeal To The Head Rather Than The Heart, However Pallid And Polite, Are Necessarily Men Of Violence. We Speak Of 'touching' A Man's Heart, But We Can Do Nothing To His Head But Hit It.

Thinking Means Connecting Things, And Stops If They Cannot Be Connected.

Whatever Else We May Say Of Our Own Age, For Good Or Evil, Nobody Is Likely To Call It An Age Of Reason.

The Past Is Not What It Was.

Precisely Because Our Political Speeches Are Meant To Be Reported, They Are Not Worth Reporting. Precisely Because They Are Carefully Designed To Be Read, Nobody Reads Them.

Political Speeches

All Conservatism Is Based Upon The Idea That If You Leave Things Alone You Leave Them As They Are. But You Do Not. If You Leave A Thing Alone You Leave It To A Torrent Of Change.

For The Mass Of Men The Idea Of Artistic Creation Can Only Be Expressed By An Idea Unpopular In Present Discussions - The Idea Of Property... Property Is Merely The Art Of The Democracy... One Would Think, To Hear People Talk, That The Rothschilds And The Rockefellers Were On The Side Of Property. But Obviously They Are The Enemies Of Property; Because They Are Enemies Of Their Own Limitations.

Life Is Not An Illogicality; Yet It Is A Trap For Logicians. It Looks Just A Little More Mathematical And Regular Than It Is; Its Exactitude Is Obvious, But Its Inexactitude Is Hidden; Its Wildness Lies In Wait.

It Isn't That They Can't See The Solution. It's That They Can't See The Problem. They Can't See The Problem If They Are Looking In The Wrong Place. They Can't See The Problem If They Have Blinders On - For 'none Are So Blind As Those That Will Not See'.

The Decay Of Society Is Praised By Artists As The Decay Of A Corpse Is Praised By Worms.

A Great Curse Has Fallen Upon Modern Life With The Discovery Of The Vastness Of The Word Education.

The Hands That Had Made The Sun And Stars Were Too Small To Reach The Huge Heads Of The Cattle. Upon This Paradox, We Might Almost Say Upon This Jest, All The Literature Of Our Faith Is Founded.

Every Sane Man Recognises That Unlimited Liberty Is Anarchy, Or Rather Is Nonentity. The Civic Idea Of Liberty Is To Give The Citizen A Province Of Liberty; A Limitation Within Which A Citizen Is A King.

A Good Novel Tells Us The Truth About Its Hero; But A Bad Novel Tells Us The Truth About Its Author.

If, Therefore, Nonsense Is Really To Be The Literature Of The Future, It Must Have Its Own Version Of The Cosmos To Offer; The World Must Not Only Be Tragic, Romantic, And Religious, It Must Be Nonsensical Also.

The Long Words Are Not The Hard Words, It Is The Short Words That Are Hard. There Is Much More Metaphysical Subtlety In The Word "damn" Than In The Word "degeneration."

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.

I Have Formed A Very Clear Conception Of Patriotism. I Have Generally Found It Thrust Into The Foreground By Some Fellow Who Has Something To Hide In The Background. I Have Seen A Great Deal Of Patriotism; And I Have Generally Found It The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel.

I Always Like A Dog So Long As He Isn't Spelled Backward.

Cleanliness Is Not Next To Godliness Nowadays, For Cleanliness Is Made An Essential And Godliness Is Regarded As An Offence.

The Most Extraordinary Thing In The World Is An Ordinary Man And An Ordinary Woman And Their Ordinary Children.

Faith Means Believing The Unbelievable.

The Issue Is Now Clear. It Is Between Light And Darkness And Everyone Must Choose His Side.

This Is The Age In Which Thin And Theoretic Minorities Can Cover And Conquer Unconscious And Untheoretic Majorities.

Drink Because You Are Happy, But Never Because You Are Miserable.

I Need Not Pause To Explain That Crime Is Not A Disease. It Is Criminology That Is A Disease.

If Seeds In The Black Earth Can Turn Into Such Beautiful Roses, What Might Not The Heart Of Man Become In Its Long Journey Toward The Stars?

But Perhaps God Is Strong Enough To Exult In Monotony. It Is Possible That God Says Every Morning, "do It Again" To The Sun.; And Every Evening, "do It Again" To The Moon. It May Not Be Automatic Monotony That Makes All Daisies Alike; It May Be That God Makes Every Daisy Separately, But Has Never Gotten Tired Of Making Them. It May Be That He Has The Eternal Appetite Of Infancy; For We Have Sinned And Grown Old, And Our Father Is Younger Than We.

Gratitude Produced The Most Purely Joyful Moments That Have Been Known To Man.

We Do Not Need To Get Good Laws To Restrain Bad People. We Need To Get Good People To Restrain Us From Bad Laws.

To Have A Right To Do A Thing Is Not At All The Same As To Be Right In Doing It.

Family Is The Theatre Of The Spiritual Drama, The Place Where Things Happen, Especially The Things That Matter.

Any One Of The Strange Laws We Suffer Is A Compromise Between A Fad And A Vested Interest.

And It Is Always The Humble Man Who Talks Too Much; The Proud Man Watches Himself Too Closely.

When Once You Have Got Hold Of A Vulgar Joke, You May Be Certain That You Have Got Hold Of A Subtle And Spiritual Idea.

We Are Talking About An Artist; And For The Enjoyment Of The Artist The Mask Must Be To Some Extent Moulded On The Face. What He Makes Outside Him Must Correspond To Something Inside Him; He Can Only Make His Effects Out Of Some Of The Materials Of His Soul.

The Books That Influence The World Are Those That It Has Not Read.

I Left The Fairy Tales Lying On The Floor Of The Nursery, And I Have Not Found Any Books So Sensible Since.

Because Our Expression Is Imperfect We Need Friendship To Fill Up The Imperfections.

Free Verse'? You May As Well Call Sleeping In A Ditch 'free Architecture'.

Think Of All Those Ages Through Which Men Have Had The Courage To Die, And Then Remember That We Have Actually Fallen To Talking About Having The Courage To Live.

Either Criticism Is No Good At All (a Very Defensible Position) Or Else Criticism Means Saying About An Author The Very Things That Would Have Made Him Jump Out Of His Boots.

...but Nature Does Not Say That Cats Are More Valuable Than Mice; Nature Makes No Remark On The Subject. She Does Not Even Say That The Cat Is Enviable Or The Mouse Pitiable. We Think The Cat Superior Because We Have (or Most Of Us Have) A Particular Philosophy To The Effect That Life Is Better Than Death. But If The Mouse Were A German Pessimist Mouse, He Might Not Think That The Cat Had Beaten Him At All. He Might Think He Had Beaten The Cat By Getting To The Grave First.

The More We Are Certain What Good Is, The More We Shall See Good In Everything.

If The Barricades Went Up In Our Streets And The Poor Became Masters, I Think The Priests Would Escape, I Fear The Gentlemen Would; But I Believe The Gutters Would Simply Be Running With The Blood Of Philanthropists.

They Say Travel Broadens The Mind, But You Must Have The Mind.

Fable Is More Historical Than Fact, Because Fact Tells Us About One Man And Fable Tells Us About A Million Men.

I Defy Anybody To Say What Are The Rights Of A Citizen, If They Do Not Include The Control Of His Own Diet In Relation To His Own Health.

I Will Go Forth As A Real Outlaw," He Said, "and As Men Do Robbery On The Highway I Will Do Right On The Highway; And It Will Be Counted A Wilder Crime.

Christianity Even When Watered Down Is Hot Enough To Boil All Modern Society To Rags.

It Might Reasonably Be Maintained That The True Object Of All Human Life Is Play. Earth Is A Task Garden; Heaven Is A Playground. To Be At Last In Such Secure Innocence That One Can Juggle With The Universe And The Stars, To Be So Good That One Can Treat Everything As A Joke - That May Be, Perhaps, The Real End And Final Holiday Of Human Souls.

An Inconvenience Is An Adventure Wrongly Considered.

Marriage Is An Adventure, Like Going To War.

The Woman Does Not Work Because The Man Tells Her To Work And She Obeys. On The Contrary, The Woman Works Because She Has Told The Man To Work And He Hasn’t Obeyed.

Wit Is A Sword; It Is Meant To Make People Feel The Point As Well As See It.

We Do Not Need A Censorship Of The Press. We Have A Censorship By The Press... It Is Not We Who Silence The Press. It Is The Press Who Silences Us.

The True Soldier Fights Not Because He Hates What Is In Front Of Him, But Because He Loves What Is Behind Him.

He Can Only Get Away From Death By Continually Stepping Within An Inch Of It.

There Is Only One Thing That Stands In Our Midst, Attenuated And Threatened, But Enthroned In Some Power Like A Ghost Of The Middle Ages: The Trade Unions.

The Great Intellectual Tradition That Comes Down To Us From The Past Was Never Interrupted Or Lost Through Such Trifles As The Sack Of Rome, The Triumph Of Attila, Or All The Barbarian Invasions Of The Dark Ages. It Was Lost After The Introduction Of Printing, The Discovery Of America, The Founding Of The Royal Society, And All The Enlightenment Of The Renaissance And The Modern World. It Was There, If Anywhere, That There Was Lost Or Impatiently Snapped The Long Thin Delicate Thread That Had Descended From Distant Antiquity; The Thread Of That Unusual Human Hobby: The Habit Of Thinking.

The Madman Is The Man Who Has Lost Everything Except His Reason.

Lost Everything

Men Rush Towards Complexity, But They Yearn Towards Simplicity. They Try To Be Kings; But They Dream Of Being Shepherds.

I've Searched All The Parks In All The Cities - And Found No Statues Of Committees.

To Love Means Loving The Unlovable. To Forgive Means Pardoning The Unpardonable. Faith Means Believing The Unbelievable. Hope Means Hoping When Everything Seems Hopeless.

[consider] A Fence Or Gate Erected Across A Road] The More Modern Type Of Reformer Goes Gaily Up To It And Says, "i Don't See The Use Of This; Let Us Clear It Away." To Which The More Intelligent Type Of Reformer Will Do Well To Answer: "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 Obvious Effect Of Frivolous Divorce Will Be Frivolous Marriage. If People Can Be Separated For No Reason They Will Feel It All The Easier To Be United For No Reason.

Freethinkers Are Occasionally Thoughtful, Though Never Free.

A Citizen Can Hardly Distinguish Between A Tax And A Fine, Except That The Fine Is Generally Much Lighter.

[there Is] One Distinctly Human Thing - The Story. There Can Be As Good Science About A Turnip As About A Man. ... [or Philosophy, Or Theology] ...there Can Be, Without Any Question At All, As Good Higher Mathematics About A Turnip As About A Man. But I Do Not Think, Though I Speak In A Manner Somewhat Tentative, That There Could Be As Good A Novel Written About A Turnip As A Man.

We Are Learning To Do A Great Many Clever Things. The Next Great Task Will Be To Learn Not To Do Them.

The Only Object Of Liberty Is Life.

The Whole Object Of Travel Is Not To Set Foot On Foreign Land; It Is At Last To Set Foot On One's Own Country As A Foreign Land.

Lord! What A Strange World In Which A Man Cannot Remain Unique Even By Taking The Trouble To Go Mad!

The Ordinary Scientific Man Is Strictly A Sentimentalist. He Is A Sentimentalist In This Essential Sense, That He Is Soaked And Swept Away By Mere Associations.

An Event Is Not Any More Intrinsically Intelligible Or Unintelligible Because Of The Pace At Which It Moves. For A Man Who Does Not Believe In A Miracle, A Slow Miracle Would Be Just As Incredible As A Swift One. The Greek Witch May Have Turned Sailors To Swine With A Stroke Of The Wand. But To See A Naval Gentleman Of Our Acquaintance Looking A Little More Like A Pig Every Day, Till He Ended With Four Trotters And A Curly Tail, Would Not Be Any More Soothing. It Might Be Rather More Creepy And Uncanny.

Every Work Of Art Has One Indispensable Mark ... The Center Of It Is Simple, However Much The Fulfillment May Be Complicated.

Education Is Implication. It Is Not The Things You Say Which Children Respect; When You Say Things, They Very Commonly Laugh And Do The Opposite. It Is The Things You Assume Which Really Sink Into Them. It Is The Things You Forget Even To Teach That They Learn.

Liberty Has Produced Scepticism, And Scepticism Has Destroyed Liberty. The Lovers Of Liberty Thought They Were Leaving It Unlimited, When They Were Only Leaving It Undefined. They Thought They Were Only Leaving It Undefined, When They Were Really Leaving It Undefended.

The Declaration Of Independence Dogmatically Bases All Rights On The Fact That God Created All Men Equal; And It Is Right; For If They Were Not Created Equal, They Were Certainly Evolved Unequal. There Is No Basis For Democracy Except In A Dogma About The Divine Origin Of Man.

Education Is Simply The Soul Of A Society As It Passes From One Generation To Another.

Comradeship Is Obvious And Universal And Open; But It Is Only One Kind Of Affection; It Has Characteristics That Would Destroy Any Other Kind. Anyone Who Has Known True Comradeship In A Club Or In A Regiment, Knows That It Is Impersonal.

The More Truly We Can See Life As A Fairytale, The More Clearly The Tale Resolves Itself Into War With The Dragon Who Is Wasting Fairyland.

Boyhood Is A Most Complex And Incomprehensible Thing. Even When One Has Been Through It, One Does Not Understand What It Was. A Man Can Never Quite Understand A Boy, Even When He Has Been The Boy.

The Theory Of Free Speech, That Truth Is So Much Larger And Stranger And More Many-sided Than We Know Of, That It Is Very Much Better At All Costs To Hear Everyone's Account Of It, Is A Theory Which Has Been Justified On The Whole By Experiment, But Which Remains A Very Daring And Even A Very Surprising Theory. It Is Really One Of The Great Discoveries Of The Modern Time.

We Fear Men So Much, Because We Fear God So Little. One Fear Cures Another. When Man's Terror Scares You, Turn Your Thoughts To The Wrath Of God.

He Said He Didn't Very Well Understand How George Was Going To Sleep Any More Than He Did Now, Seeing That There Were Only Twenty-four Hours In Each Day.

Dear Sir: Regarding Your Article 'what's Wrong With The World?' I Am. Yours Truly.

The Simple Sense Of Wonder At The Shapes Of Things, And At Their Exuberant Independence Of Our Intellectual Standards And Our Trivial Definitions, Is The Basis Of Spirituality.

If I Did Not Believe In God, I Should Still Want My Doctor, My Lawyer And My Banker To Do So.

A Good Man's Work Is Effected By Doing What He Does, A Woman's By Being What She Is.

When We Really Worship Anything, We Love Not Only Its Clearness But Its Obscurity. We Exult In Its Very Invisibility.

Jesus Promised His Disciples Three Things—that They Would Be Completely Fearless, Absurdly Happy, And In Constant Trouble.

I Believe In Getting Into Hot Water; It Keeps You Clean.

To Downgrade The Human Mind Is Bad Theology.

Women Prefer To Talk In Twos, While Men Prefer To Talk In Threes.

Take Not Thy Thunder From Us, But Take Away Our Pride.

Materialists And Madmen Never Have Doubts.

The Outer Ring Of Christianity Is A Rigid Guard Of Ethical Abnegations And Professional Priests; But Inside That Inhuman Guard You Will Find The Old Human Life Dancing Like Children And Drinking Wine Like Men; For Christianity Is The Only Frame For Pagan Freedom. But In The Modern Philosophy The Case Is Opposite; It Is Its Outer Ring That Is Obviously Artistic And Emancipated; Its Despair Is Within.

Joy, Which Was The Small Publicity Of The Pagan, Is The Gigantic Secret Of The Christian.

You Can Never Have A Revolution In Order To Establish A Democracy. You Must Have A Democracy In Order To Have A Revolution.

Democracies Have

In The Struggle For Existence, It Is Only On Those Who Hang On For Ten Minutes After All Is Hopeless, That Hope Begins To Dawn.

Why Are We Not Grateful To God For Filling Our Stockings With Legs?

The Act Of Defending Any Of The Cardinal Virtues Has Today All The Exhilaration Of A Vice.

In All Legends Men Have Thought Of Women As Sublime Separately But Horrible In A Herd.

The Sentimentalist, Roughly Speaking, Is The Man Who Wants To Eat His Cake And Have It. He Has No Sense Of Honor About Ideas; He Will Not See That One Must Pay For An Idea As Well As For Anything Else. He Will Have Them All At Once In One Wild Intellectual Harem, No Matter How Much They Quarrel And Contradict Each Other.

Price Is A Crazy And Incalculable Thing, While Value Is An Intrinsic And Indestructible Thing.

Do Not Look At The Faces In The Illustrated Papers. Look At The Faces In The Street.

The Only Way To Be Sure Of Catching A Train Is To Miss The One Before It.

The Thing That Cannot Be Defined Is The First Thing; The Primary Fact.

Nine Times Out Of Ten It Is The Coarse Word That Condemns An Evil, And The Refined Word That Excuses It.

America Has A Genius For The Encouragement Of Fame.

I Am More Than A Devil; I Am A Man. I Can Do The One Thing Which Satan Himself Cannot Do— I Can Die.

If Our Caricaturists Do Not Hate Their Enemies, It Is Not Because They Are Too Big To Hate Them, But Because Their Enemies Are Not Big Enough To Hate.

Only Man Can Be Absurd: For Only Man Can Be Dignified.

But Those Dealing In The Actual Manufacture Of Mind Are Dealing In A Very Explosive Material. The Material Is Not Merely The Clay Of Which Man Is Master, But The Truths Or Semblances Of Truth Which Have A Certain Mastery Over Man. The Material Is Explosive Because It Must Be Taken Seriously. The Men Writing Books Really Are Throwing Bombs.

If I Can Put One Touch Of Rosy Sunset Into The Life Of Any Man Or Woman, I Shall Feel That I Have Worked With God.

We Are All In The Same Boat, In A Stormy Sea, And We Owe Each Other A Terrible Loyalty.

People Seem To Fight About Things Very Unsuitable For Fighting. They Make A Frightful Noise In Support Of Very Quiet Things. They Knock Each Other About In The Name Of Very Fragile Things.

Leaving The Complications Of The Human Breakfast-table Out Of Account, In An Elemental Sense, The Egg Only Exists To Produce The Chicken. But The Chicken Does Not Exist Only In Order To Produce Another Egg. He May Also Exist To Amuse Himself, To Praise God, And Even To Suggest Ideas To A French Dramatist. Being A Conscious Life, He Is, Or May Be, Valuable In Himself.

Nobody Understands The Nature Of The Church, Or The Ringing Note Of The Creed Descending From Antiquity, Who Does Not Realize That The Whole World Once Very Nearly Died Of Broadmindedness And The Brotherhood Of All Religions.

Oscar Wilde Said That Sunsets Were Not Valued Because We Could Not Pay For Sunsets. But Oscar Wilde Was Wrong; We Can Pay For Sunsets. We Can Pay For Them By Not Being Oscar Wilde.

A Third-class Carriage Is A Community, While A First-class Carriage Is A Place Of Wild Hermits.

If We Are Bound To Improve, We Need Not Trouble To Improve. The Pure Doctrine Of Progress Is The Best Of All Reasons For Not Being A Progressive.

Somehow One Must Love The World Without Being Worldly.

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.

Stated Baldly, Charity Certainly Means One Of Two Things–pardoning Unpardonable Acts, Or Loving Unlovable People.

We Actually Love Ourselves More Than We Love Joy.

The Great Ideals Of The Past Failed Not By Being Outlived (which Must Mean Over-lived), But By Not Being Lived Enough. Mankind Has Not Passed Through The Middle Ages. Rather Mankind Has Retreated From The Middle Ages In Reaction And Rout. The Christian Ideal Has Not Been Tried And Found Wanting. It Has Been Found Difficult And Left Untried.

To The Humble Man, And To The Humble Man Alone, The Sun Is Really A Sun; To The Humble Man, And To The Humble Man Alone, The Sea Is Really A Sea.

That Is The One Eternal Education: To Be Sure Enough That Something Is True That You Dare To Tell It To A Child.

If A Man Does Not Talk To Himself, It Is Because He Is Not Worth Talking To.

What Is Education? Properly Speaking, There Is No Such Thing As Education. Education Is Simply The Soul Of A Society As It Passes From One Generation To Another. Whatever The Soul Is Like, It Will Have To Be Passed On Somehow, Consciously Or Unconsciously, And That Transition May Be Called Education. ... What We Need Is To Have A Culture Before We Hand It Down. In Other Words, It Is A Truth, However Sad And Strange, That We Cannot Give What We Have Not Got, And Cannot Teach To Other People What We Do Not Know Ourselves.

Blessed Is He That Expecteth Nothing, For He Shall Be Gloriously Surprised.

O God Of Earth And Altar, Bow Down And Hear Our Cry, Our Earthly Rulers Falter, Our People Drift And Die; The Walls Of Gold Entomb Us, The Swords Of Scorn Divide, Take Not Thy Thunder From Us, But Take Away Our Pride.

The Idea Of Private Property Universal But Private, The Idea Of Families Free But Still Families, Of Domesticity Democratic But Still Domestic, Of One Man One House - This Remains The Real Vision And Magnet Of Mankind. The World May Accept Something More Official And General, Less Human And Intimate. But The World Will Be Like A Broken-hearted Woman Who Makes A Humdrum Marriage Because She May Not Make A Happy One; Socialism May Be The World's Deliverance, But It Is Not The World's Desire.

Paradox - Truth Standing On Her Head To Get Attention.

Theology Is Only Thought Applied To Religion.

The Danger Of Loss Of Faith In God Is Not That One Will Believe In Nothing, But Rather That One Will Believe In Anything.

To Hurry Through One's Leisure Is The Most Unbusiness-like Of Actions.

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