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This Is The Perpetual And Pitiful Tragedy Of The Practical Man In Practical Affairs. He Always Begins With A Flourish Of Contempt For What He Calls Theorizing And What People Who Can Do It Call Thinking. He Will Not Wait For Logic-that Is, In The Most Exact Sense, He Will Not Listen To Reason. It Will Therefore Appear To Him An Idle And Ineffectual Proceeding To Say That There Is A Reason For His Present Failure. Nevertheless, It May Be Well To Say It, And To Try And Make It Clear Even To Him.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

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This Is The Perpetual

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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This Is The Perpetual And Pitiful Tragedy Of The Practical Man In Practical Affairs. He Always Begins With A Flourish Of Contempt For What He Calls Theorizing And What People Who Can Do It Call Thinking. He Will Not Wait For Logic-that Is, In The Most Exact Sense, He Will Not Listen To Reason. It Will Therefore Appear To Him An Idle And Ineffectual Proceeding To Say That There Is A Reason For His Present Failure. Nevertheless, It May Be Well To Say It, And To Try And Make It Clear Even To Him.

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Business, Especially Big Business, Is Now Organized Like An Army. It Is, As Some Would Say, A Sort Of Mild Militarism Without Bloodshed; As I Say, A Militarism Without The Military Virtues.

Whatever Else May Be Said Of Man, This One Thing Is Clear: He Is Not What He Is Capable Of Being.

The Trouble With Always Trying To Preserve The Health Of The Body Is That It Is So Difficult To Do Without Destroying The Health Of The Mind.

One Can Hardly Think Too Little Of One's Self. One Can Hardly Think Too Much Of One's Soul.

I Suppose Every One Must Have Reflected How Primeval And How Poetical Are The Things That One Carries In One's Pocket; The Pocket-knife, For Instance, The Type Of All Human Tools, The Infant Of The Sword. Once I Planned To Write A Book Of Poems Entirely About Things In My Pockets. But I Found It Would Be Too Long; And The Age Of The Great Epics Is Past.

Brave Men Are All Vertebrates; They Have Their Softness On The Surface And Their Toughness In The Middle.

There Are Many Ways To Fall Down, But There's Only One Way To Stand Up Straight.

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

Education Is The Period During Which You Are Being Instructed By Somebody You Do Not Know, About Something You Do Not Want To Know.

Circumstances Break Men's Bones; It Has Never Been Shown That They Break Men's Optimism.

Evil Always Wins Through The Strength Of Its Splendid Dupes; And There Has In All Ages Been A Disastrous Alliance Between Abnormal Innocence And Abnormal Sin.

In Catholicism, The Pint, The Pipe And The Cross Can All Fit Together.

Democracy Is Reproached With Saying That The Majority Is Always Right. But Progress Says That The Minority Is Always Right.

The Objection To Fairy Stories Is That They Tell Children There Are Dragons. But Children Have Always Known There Are Dragons. Fairy Stories Tell Children That Dragons Can Be Killed.

He Must Not Merely Cling To Life, For Then He Will Be A Coward, And Will Not Escape. He Must Not Merely Wait For Death, For Then He Will Be A Suicide, And Will Not Escape. He Must Seek His Life In A Spirit Of Furious Indifference To It.

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.

But Since He Stood For England And Knew What England Means, Unless You Give Him Bacon You Must Not Give Him Beans.

Mr. Blatchford Says That There Was Not A Fall But A Gradual Rise. But The Very Word "rise" Implies That You Know Toward What You Are Rising. Unless There Is A Standard You Cannot Tell Whether You Are Rising Or Falling. But The Main Point Is That The Fall Like Every Other Large Path Of Christianity Is Embodied In The Common Language Talked On The Top Of An Omnibus. Anybody Might Say, "very Few Men Are Really Manly." Nobody Would Say, "very Few Whales Are Really Whaley."

Just The Other Day In The Underground I Enjoyed The Pleasure Of Offering My Seat To Three Ladies.

For They (capitalists) Hold As Their Chief Heresy, In A Coarser Form, The Fundamental Falsehood That Things Are Not Made To Be Used But Made To Be Sold. All The Collapse Of Their Commercial System In Their Own Time Has Been Due To That Fallacy Of Forcing Things On A Market Where There Was No Market; Of Continually Increasing The Power Of Supply Without Increasing The Power Of Demand; Of Briefly, Of Always Considering The Man Who Sells The Potato And Never Considering The Man Who Eats It.

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

Earth Will Grow Worse Till Men Redeem It, And Wars More Evil, Ere All Wars Cease.

I Regard Golf As An Expensive Way Of Playing Marbles.

Every Man Who Will Not Have Softening Of The Heart Must At Last Have Softening Of The Brain

We Talk Of Wild Animals But Man Is The Only Wild Animal. It Is Man That Has Broken Out. All Other Animals Are Tame Animals; Following The Rugged Respectability Of The Tribe Or Type.

The More I Considered Christianity, The More I Found That While It Had Established A Rule And Order, The Chief Aim Of That Order Was To Give Room For Good Things To Run Wild.

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. These Essays, Futile As They Are Considered As Serious Literature, Are Yet Ethically Sincere, Since They Seek To Remind Men That Things Must Be Loved First And Improved Afterwards.

Leisure Is Being Allowed To Do Nothing.

Christendom Has Had A Series Of Revolutions And In Each One Of Them Christianity Has Died. Christianity Has Died Many Times And Risen Again; For It Had A God Who Knew The Way Out Of The Grave.

You'll Never Find The Solution If You Don't See The Problem.

Individually, Men May Present A More Or Less Rational Appearance, Eating, Sleeping, And Scheming. But Humanity A A Whole Is Changeful, Mystical, Fickle, Delightful. Men Are Men, But Man Is A Woman.

If The Common Man In The Past Had A Grave Respect For Property, It May Conceivably Have Been Because He Sometimes Had Some Of His Own.

All Science, Even The Divine Science, Is A Sublime Detective Story. Only It Is Not Set To Detect Why A Man Is Dead; But The Darker Secret Of Why He Is Alive.

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.

According To Most Philosophers, God In Making The World Enslaved It. According To Christianity, In Making It, He Set It Free. God Had Written, Not So Much A Poem, But Rather A Play; A Play He Had Planned As Perfect, But Which Had Necessarily Been Left To Human Actors And Stage-managers, Who Had Since Made A Great Mess Of It.

Man Knows That There Are In The Soul Tints More Bewildering, More Numberless, And More Nameless That The Colors Of An Autumn Forest....yet He Seriously Believes That These Things Can Every One Of Them , In All Their Tones And Semi-tones, In All Their Blends And Unions, Be Accurately Represented By An Arbitrary System Of Grunts And Squeals. He Believes That An Ordinary Civilized Stockbroker Can Really Produce Out Of His Own Inside Noises Which Denote All The Mysteries Of Memory And All The Agonies Of Desire.

Your Next-door Neighbor Is Not A Man; He Is An Environment. He Is The Barking Of A Dog; He Is The Noise Of A Piano; He Is A Dispute About A Party Wall; He Is Drains That Are Worse Than Yours, Or Roses That Are Better Than Yours.

I Believe What Really Happens In History Is This: The Old Man Is Always Wrong; And The Young People Are Always Wrong About What Is Wrong With Him. The Practical Form It Takes Is This: That, While The Old Man May Stand By Some Stupid Custom, The Young Man Always Attacks It With Some Theory That Turns Out To Be Equally Stupid.

It Is Quite Easy To See Why A Legend Is Treated, And Ought To Be Treated, More Respectfully Than A Book Of History. The Legend Is Generally Made By The Majority Of People In The Village, Who Are Sane. The Book Is Generally Written By The One Man In The Village Who Is Mad.

There Are Two Ways To Get Enough. One Is To Continue To Accumulate More And More. The Other Is To Desire Less.

And We Were Angry And Poor And Happy, And Proud Of Seeing Our Names In Print.

The Truth Is That There Are No Things For Which Men Will Make Such Herculean Efforts As The Things Of Which They Know They Are Unworthy.

A Great Man Knows He Is Not God, And The Greater He Is The Better He Knows It.

Physical Science Is Like Simple Addition: It Is Either Infallible Or It Is False.

Physical Science

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

London Is A Riddle. Paris Is An Explanation.

...there Is In Life An Element Of Elfin Coincidence Which People Reckoning On The Prosaic May Perpetually Miss. As It Has Been Well Expressed In The Paradox Of Poe, Wisdom Should Reason On The Unforeseen.

Even In A Minute Instance, It Is Best To Look First To The Main Tendencies Of Nature. A Particular Flower May Not Be Dead In Early Winter, But The Flowers Are Dying; A Particular Pebble May Never Be Wetted With The Tide, But The Tide Is Coming In. To The Scientific Eye All Human History Is A Series Of Collective Movements, Destructions Or Migrations, Like The Massacre Of Flies In Winter Or The Return Of Birds In Spring.

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.

There Is Less Difference Than Many Suppose Between The Ideal Socialist System, In Which The Big Businesses Are Run By The State, And The Present Capitalist System, In Which The State Is Run By The Big Businesses.

There Are No Uninteresting Things, Only Uninterested People.

With Any Recovery From Morbidity There Must Go A Certain Healthy Humiliation.

Humility Is The Mother Of Giants.

Not Only Is Suicide A Sin, It Is The Sin. It Is The Ultimate And Absolute Evil, The Refusal To Take An Interest In Existence; The Refusal To Take The Oath Of Loyalty To Life. The Man Who Kills A Man, Kills A Man. The Man Who Kills Himself, Kills All Men. As Far As He Is Concerned He Wipes Out The World.

Human Anger Is A Higher Thing Than What Is Called Divine Discontent. For You Must Be Angry With Something; But You Can Be Discontented With Everything.

It Is Not Greedy To Enjoy A Good Dinner, Any More Than It Is To Enjoy A Good Concert. But I Do Think There Is Something Greedy About Trying To Enjoy The Dinner And The Concert At The Same Time.

Daybreak Is A Never-ending Glory; Getting Out Of Bed Is A Never Ending Nuisance.

I Should Favour Anything That Would Increase The Present Enormous Authority Of Women And Their Creative Action In Their Own Homes. The Average Woman...is A Despot; The Average Man Is A Serf.

Man Is An Exception, Whatever Else He Is. If He Is Not The Image Of God, Then He Is A Disease Of The Dust. If It Is Not True That A Divine Being Fell, Then We Can Only Say That One Of The Animals Went Entirely Off Its Head.

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.

Let Your Religion Be Less Of A Theory And More Of A Love Affair.

The Moderns Do Not Realize Modernity.

Tolerance Is The Virtue Of People Who Do Not Believe In Anything.

The Great Saint May Be Said To Mix All His Thoughts With Thanks. All Goods Look Better When They Look Like Gifts.

A Sober Man May Become A Drunkard Through Being A Coward. A Brave Man May Become A Coward Through Being A Drunkard.

The Problem Of Disbelieving In God Is Not That A Man Ends Up Believing Nothing. Alas, It Is Much Worse. He Ends Up Believing Anything.

Who Would Condescend To Strike Down The Mere Things That He Does Not Fear? Who Would Debase Himself To Be Merely Brave, Like Any Common Prizefighter? Who Would Stoop To Be Fearless--like A Tree? Fight The Thing That You Fear. You Remember The Old Tale Of The English Clergyman Who Gave The Last Rites To The Brigand Of Sicily, And How On His Death-bed The Great Robber Said, 'i Can Give You No Money, But I Can Give You Advice For A Lifetime: Your Thumb On The Blade, And Strike Upwards.' So I Say To You, Strike Upwards, If You Strike At The Stars.

Poetry Is Sane Because It Floats Easily In An Infinite Sea; Reason Seeks To Cross The Infinite Sea And So Make It Finite. The Result Is Mental Exhaustion. To Accept Everything Is An Exercise, To Understand Everything A Strain.

I Would Look At The First Chapter Of Any New Novel As A Final Test Of Its Merits. If There Was A Murdered Man Under The Sofa In The First Chapter, I Read The Story. If There Was No Murdered Man Under The Sofa In The First Chapter, I Dismissed The Story As Tea-table Twaddle, Which It Often Really Was.

To Mix Science Up With Philosophy Is Only To Produce A Philosophy That Has Lost All Its Ideal Value And A Science That Has Lost All Its Practical Value. It Is For My Private Physician To Tell Me Whether This Or That Food Will Kill Me. It Is For My Private Philosopher To Tell Me Whether I Ought To Be Killed.

To Be Born Into This Earth Is To Be Born Into Uncongenial Surroundings, Hence To Be Born Into A Romance.

The Christian Is Quite Free To Believe That There Is A Considerable Amount Of Settled Order And Inevitable Development In The Universe. But The Materialist Is Not Allowed To Admit Into His Spotless Machine The Slightest Speck Of Spiritualism Or Miracle.

Youth Is Always Too Serious, And Just Now It Is Too Serious About Frivolity.

If You Happen To Read Fairy Tales, You Will Observe That One Idea Runs From One End Of Them To The Other--the Idea That Peace And Happiness Can Only Exist On Some Condition. This Idea, Which Is The Core Of Ethics, Is The Core Of The Nursery-tales.

It Is The Mark Of Our Whole Modern History That The Masses Are Kept Quiet With A Fight. They Are Kept Quiet By The Fight Because It Is A Sham-fight; Thus Most Of Us Know By This Time That The Party System Has Been Popular Only In The Sense That A Football Match Is Popular.

Civilisation Is Not To Be Judged By The Rapidity Of Communication, But By The Value Of What Is Communicated.

One Elephant Having A Trunk Was Odd; But All Elephants Having Trunks Looked Like A Plot.

The Ignorant Pronounce It Frood To Cavil Or Applaud The Well-informed Pronounce It Froyd But I Pronounce It Fraud.

You Can't Have The Family Farm Without The Family.

There Are No Wise Few. Every Aristocracy That Has Ever Existed Has Behaved, In All Essential Points, Exactly Like A Small Mob.

Tea, Although An Orientalis A Gentleman At Least;cocoa Is A Cad And Coward,cocoa Is A Vulgar Beast.

The One Stream Of Poetry Which Is Continually Flowing Is Slang.

Religious Unity Can Look Like A Carnival And Religious Liberty Can Look Like A Funeral.

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

Lost Everything

One Of The Great Disadvantages Of Hurry Is That It Takes Such A Long Time.

Then I Only Wondered Who Put The Toys In The Stocking; Now I Wonder Who Put The Stocking By The Bed, And The Bed In The Room, And The Room In The House, And The House On The Planet, And The Great Planet In The Void.

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

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.

Islam Was Something Like A Christian Heresy. The Early Heresies Had Been Full Of Mad Reversals And Evasions Of The Incarnation, Rescuing Their Jesus From The Reality Of His Body Even At The Expense Of The Sincerity Of His Soul.

We Need To Be Reminded More Than We Need To Be Instructed

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.

The Great Majority Of People Will Go On Observing Forms That Cannot Be Explained; They Will Keep Christmas Day With Christmas Gifts And Christmas Benedictions; They Will Continue To Do It; And Some Day Suddenly Wake Up And Discover Why.

Stick To The Man Who Looks Out Of The Window And Tries To Understand The World. Keep Clear Of The Man Who Looks In At The Window And Tries To Understand You.

Exactly What The Fairy Tale Does Is This: It Accustoms Him For A Series Of Clear Pictures To The Idea That These Limitless Terrors Had A Limit, That These Shapeless Enemies Have Enemies In The Knights Of God, That There Is Something In The Universe More Mystical Than Darkness, And Stronger Than Strong Fear.

The Criminal Is The Creative Artist; The Detective Only The Critic.

Ideas Are Dangerous, But The Man To Whom They Are Least Dangerous Is The Man Of Ideas. He Is Acquainted With Ideas, And Moves Among Them Like A Lion-tamer. Ideas Are Dangerous, But The Man To Whom They Are Most Dangerous Is The Man Of No Ideas. The Man Of No Ideas Will Find The First Idea Fly To His Head Like Wine To The Head Of A Teetotaller.

It Is Easy To Be Heavy: Hard To Be Light.

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.

Coincidence Is A Spiritual Pun.

The Riddles Of God Are More Satisfying Than The Solutions Of Man.

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.

America Has A New Delicacy, A Coarse, Rank Refinement.

At The Back Of Our Brains Is A Blaze Of Astonishment At Our Own Existence. The Object Of The Artistic And Spiritual Life Is To Dig For This Sunrise Of Wonder.

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.

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.

A Great Man Is Not A Man So Strong That He Feels Less Than Other Men; He Is A Man So Strong That He Feels More.

Theology Is Simply That Part Of Religion That Requires Brains.

I Have Little Doubt That When St. George Had Killed The Dragon He Was Heartily Afraid Of The Princess.

An Artist Will Betray Himself By Some Sort Of Sincerity.

The Museum Is Not Meant Either For The Wanderer To See By Accident Or For The Pilgrim To See With Awe. It Is Meant For The Mere Slave Of A Routine Of Self- Education To Stuff Himself With Every Sort Of Incongruous Intellectual Food In One Indigestible Meal.

"the Universe Repeats Itself, With The Possible Exception Of History." Of All Earthly Studies History Is The Only One That Does Not Repeat Itself. ... Astronomy Repeats Itself; Botany Repeats Itself; Trigonometry Repeats Itself; Mechanics Repeats Itself; Compound Long Division Repeats Itself. Every Sum If Worked Out In The Same Way At Any Time Will Bring Out The Same Answer. ... A Great Many Moderns Say That History Is A Science; If So It Occupies A Solitary And Splendid Elevation Among The Sciences; It Is The Only Science The Conclusions Of Which Are Always Wrong.

What We Suffer From Today Is Humility In The Wrong Place...the Old Humility Was A Spur That Prevented A Man From Stopping; Not A Nail In His Boot That Prevented Him From Going On. For The Old Humility Made A Man Doubtful About His Efforts, Which Made Him Work Harder. But The New Humility Makes A Man Doubtful About His Aims, Which Will Make Him Stop Working Altogether.

Around Every Corner Is Another Gift Waiting To Surprise Us, And It Will Surprise Us If We Can Achieve Control Over Our Natural Tendencies To Make Comparisons [to Things That Are Better Rather Than Things That Are Worse], To Take Things For Granted [rather Than Imagining How Much Worse Things Would Be If They Weren't There And So Feeling Grateful], And To Feel Entitled!

By A Curious Confusion, Many Modern Critics Have Passed From The Proposition That A Masterpiece May Be Unpopular To The Other Proposition That Unless It Is Unpopular It Cannot Be A Masterpiece.

A Great City Is The Place To Escape The True Drama Of Provincial Life, And Find Solace In Fantasy.

The Old Religionist Cried Out For His God. The New Religionist Cries Out For Some God To Be His.

The Bible Tells Us To Love Our Neighbors, And Also To Love Our Enemies; Probably Because They Are Generally The Same People.

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

It Was Not The House That Grew Dull, But I That Grew Dull In It. My Wife Was Better Than All Women, And Yet I Could Not Feel It.

Experience Which Was Once Claimed By The Aged Is Now Claimed Exclusively By The Young.

Marriage Halves Our Griefs, Doubles Our Joys, And Quadruples Our Expenses

The Real Trouble With This World Of Ours Is Not That It Is An Unreasonable One. The Trouble Is That It Is Nearly Reasonable, But Not Quite.

Truth Can Understand Error, But Error Cannot Understand Truth.

The Disadvantage Of Men Not Knowing The Past Is That They Do Not Know The Present. History Is A Hill Or High Point Of Vantage, From Which Alone Men See The Town In Which They Live Or The Age In Which They Are Living.

People Wonder Why The Novel Is The Most Popular Form Of Literature; People Wonder Why It Is Read More Than Books Of Science Or Books Of Metaphysics. The Reason Is Very Simple; It Is Merely That The Novel Is More True Than They Are.

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

The English Are No Nearer Than They Were A Hundred Years Ago To Knowing What Jefferson Really Meant When He Said That God Had Created All Men Equal.

Progress Is The Mother Of Problems.

It Is True That I Am Of An Older Fashion; Much That I Love Has Been Destroyed Or Sent Into Exile.

It Is Shorter To State The Things Forbidden Than The Things Permitted; Precisely Because Most Things Are Permitted And Only A Few Things Forbidden.

America Is The Only Country Ever Founded On A Creed.

We Are Always Giving Foreign Names To Very Native Things. If There Is A Thing That Reeks Of The Glorious Tradition Of The Old English Tavern, It Is Toasted Cheese. But For Some Wild Reason We Call It Welsh Rarebit. I Believe That What We Call Irish Stew Might More Properly Be Called English Stew, And That It Is Not Particularly Familiar In Ireland.

In Every Serious Doctrine Of The Destiny Of Men, There Is Some Trace Of The Doctrine Of The Equality Of Men. But The Capitalist Really Depends On Some Religion Of Inequality. The Capitalist Must Somehow Distinguish Himself From Human Kind; He Must Be Obviously Above It Or He Would Be Obviously Below It.

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.

The Most Poetical Thing In The World Is Not Being Sick.

An Adventure Is Only An Inconvenience Rightly Considered. An Inconvenience Is Only An Adventure Wrongly Considered.

If You Argue With A Madman, It Is Extremely Probable That You Will Get The Worst Of It; For In Many Ways His Mind Moves All The Quicker For Not Being Delayed By The Things That Go With Good Judgment.

Christian Inspirational

For When We Cease To Worship God, We Do Not Worship Nothing, We Worship Anything.

Aristocracy Is An Atmosphere; It Is Sometimes A Healthy Atmosphere; But It Is Very Hard To Say When It Becomes An Unhealthy Atmosphere. You Can Prove That A Man Is Not The Son Of A King, Or That He Is Not The Delegate Of A Definite Number Of People. But You Cannot Prove That A Man Is Not A Gentleman.

If Men Will Not Be Governed By The Ten Commandments, They Shall Be Governed By The Ten Thousand Commandments

And I Will Add This Point Of Merely Personal Experience Of Humanity: When Men Have A Real Explanation They Explain It, Eagerly And Copiously And In Common Speech, As Huxley Freely Gave It When He Thought He Had It. When They Have No Explanation To Offer, They Give Short Dignified Replies, Disdainful Of The Ignorance Of The Multitude.

Against A Dark Sky, All Flowers Look Like Fireworks.

I Don't Deny," He Said, "that There Should Be Priests To Remind Men That They Will One Day Die. I Only Say That At Certain Strange Epochs It Is Necessary To Have Another Kind Of Priests, Called Poets, Actually To Remind Men That They Are Not Dead Yet.

If A Man Called Christmas Day A Mere Hypocritical Excuse For Drunkenness And Gluttony, That Would Be False, But It Would Have A Fact Hidden In It Somewhere. But When Bernard Shaw Says The Christmas Day Is Only A Conspiracy Kept Up By Poulterers And Wine Merchants From Strictly Business Motives, Then He Says Something Which Is Not So Much False As Startling And Arrestingly Foolish. He Might As Well Say That The Two Sexes Were Invented By Jewellers Who Wanted To Sell Wedding Rings.

For Tommy, On That Hot And Empty Afternoon, Was In A State Of Mind In Which Grown-up People Go Away And Write Books About Their Whole World, And Stories About What It Is Like To Be Married, And Plays About The Important Problems Of Modern Times. Tommy, Being Only Ten Years Old, Was Not Able To Do Harm On This Large And Handsome Scale.

Right Is Right Even If Nobody Does It. Wrong Is Wrong Even If Everybody Is Wrong About It.

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.

With Every Step Of Our Lives We Enter Into The Middle Of Some Story Which We Are Certain To Misunderstand.

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.

Literary Men Are Being Employed To Praise A Big Business Man Personally, As Men Used To Praise A King. They Not Only Find Political Reasons For The Commercial Schemes That They Have Done For Some Time Past They Also Find Moral Defences For The Commercial Schemers... I Do Resent The Whole Age Of Patronage Being Revived Under Such Absurd Patrons; And All Poets Becoming Court Poets, Under Kings That Have Taken No Oath.

We Cannot Fling Ourselves Into The Blank Future; We Can Only Call Up Images From The Past. This Being So, The Important Principle Follows, That How Many Images We Have Largely Depends On How Much Past We Have.

History Is Not A Toboggan Slide, But A Road To Be Reconsidered And Even Retraced

I Would Never Commit The Positively Anti-social Action Of Robbing A Bank, Or Worse Still, Working In One.

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

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?

The Byzantines Hammered Away At Their Hard And Orthodox Symbols, Because They Could Not Be In A Mood To Believe That Men Could Take A Hint. The Moderns Drag Out Into Lengths And Reels Of Extravagance Their New Orthodoxy Of Being Unorthodox, Because They Also Cannot Give A Hint -- Or Take A Hint. Yet All Perfect And Well-poised Art Is Really A Hint.

The Triangle Of Truisms, Of Father, Mother And Child, Cannot Be Destroyed; It Can Only Destroy Those Civilizations Which Disregard It.

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

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.

Do Not Enjoy Yourself. Enjoy Dances And Theaters And Joy-rides And Champagne And Oysters; Enjoy Jazz And Cocktails And Night-clubs If You Can Enjoy Nothing Better; Enjoy Bigamy And Burglary And Any Crime In The Calendar, In Preference To The Other Alternative; But Never Learn To Enjoy Yourself.

To Say That A Man Is An Idealist Is Merely To Say That He Is A Man.

It Is The Test Of A Good Religion Whether You Can Joke About It.

Childlike Faith

The Home Is Not The One Tame Place In The World Of Adventure. It Is The One Wild Place In The World Of Rules And Set Tasks.

Gratitude, Being Nearly The Greatest Of Human Duties, Is Also Nearly The Most Difficult.

The Aim Of Life Is Appreciation; There Is No Sense In Not Appreciating Things; And There Is No Sense In Having More Of Them If You Have Less Appreciation Of Them.

There Nearly Always Is A Method In Madness.

The Modern World Is Not Evil; In Some Ways The Modern World Is Far Too Good. It Is Full Of Wild And Wasted Virtues. When A Religious Scheme Is Shattered (as Christianity Was Shattered At The Reformation), It Is Not Merely The Vices That Are Let Loose. The Vices Are, Indeed, Let Loose, And They Wander And Do Damage. But The Virtues Are Let Loose Also; And The Virtues Wander More Wildly, And The Virtues Do More Terrible Damage. The Modern World Is Full Of The Old Christian Virtues Gone Mad. The Virtues Have Gone Mad Because They Have Been Isolated From Each Other And Are Wandering Alone.

The Coming Peril Is The Intellectual, Educational, Psychological And Artistic Overproduction, Which, Equally With Economic Overproduction, Threatens The Well-being Of Contemporary Civilisation. People Are Inundated, Blinded, Deafened, And Mentally Paralysed By A Flood Of Vulgar And Tasteless Externals, Leaving Them No Time For Leisure, Thought, Or Creation From Within Themselves.

Literature Is A Luxury; Fiction Is A Necessity.

There Is More Simplicity In The Man Who Eats Caviar On Impulse Than In The Man Who Eats Grape-nuts On Principle.

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.

A Man Must Be Prepared Not Only To Be A Martyr, But To Be A Fool. It Is Absurd To Say That A Man Is Ready To Toil And Die For His Convictions If He Is Not Even Ready To Wear A Wreathe Around His Head For Them.

A Change Of Opinions Is Almost Unknown In An Elderly Military Man.

It Is Assumed That The Skeptic Has No Bias; Whereas He Has A Very Obvious Bias In Favour Of Skepticism.

No Man Can Be Merry Unless He Is Serious.

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?

Love Is Not Blind; That Is The Last Thing That It Is. Love Is Bound; And The More It Is Bound The Less It Is Blind.

For Religion All Men Are Equal, As All Pennies Are Equal, Because The Only Value Of Any Of Them Is That They Bear The Image Of The King.

The Martyr Endured Tortures To Affirm His Belief In Truth But He Never Asserted His Disbelief In Torture.

God Is Like The Sun; You Cannot Look At It, But Without It You Cannot Look At Anything Else.

People Accuse Journalism Of Being Too Personal; But To Me It Has Always Seemed Far Too Impersonal. It Is Charged With Tearing Away The Veils From Private Life; But It Seems To Me To Be Always Dropping Diaphanous But Blinding Veils Between Men And Men. The Yellow Press Is Abused For Exposing Facts Which Are Private; I Wish The Yellow Press Did Anything So Valuable. It Is Exactly The Decisive Individual Touches That It Never Gives; And A Proof Of This Is That After One Has Met A Man A Million Times In The Newspapers It Is Always A Complete Shock And Reversal To Meet Him In Real Life.

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

If The Apple Hit Newton’s Nose, Newton’s Nose Hit The Apple.

Silence Is The Unbearable Repartee.

We Ought To Be Interested In That Darkest And Most Real Part Of A Man In Which Dwell Not The Vices That He Does Not Display, But The Virtues That He Cannot.

The Doctrine Of Human Equality Reposes On This: That There Is No Man Really Clever Who Has Not Found That He Is Stupid.

Do Not Free A Camel Of The Burden Of His Hump; You May Be Freeing Him From Being A Camel.

Inspirational Life

A Catholic Is A Person Who Has Plucked Up Courage To Face The Incredible And Inconceivable Idea That Something Else May Be Wiser Than He Is.

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

Church And State

A Modern Vegetarian Is Also A Teetotaler, Yet There Is No Obvious Connection Between Consuming Vegetables And Not Consuming Fermented Vegetables. A Drunkard, When Lifted Laboriously Out Of The Gutter, Might Well Be Heard Huskily To Plead That He Had Fallen There Through Excessive Devotion To A Vegetable Diet.

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

Truth Must Necessarily Be Stranger Than Fiction, For Fiction Is The Creation Of The Human Mind And Therefore Congenial To It.

La Mejor Prueba De La Cultura Y La Liberalidad De Un Hombre Es Su Actitud Ante Las Cosas Que Nunca Sucedieron.

Hope Is The Power Of Being Cheerful In Circumstances Which We Know To Be Desperate.

Before The Gods That Made The Gods Had Seen Their Sunrise Pass, The White Horse Of The White Horse Vale Was Cut Out Of The Grass.

Without Authority There Is No Liberty. Freedom Is Doomed To Destruction At Every Turn, Unless There Is A Recognized Right To Freedom. And If There Are Rights, There Is An Authority To Which We Appeal For Them.

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.

No Sceptical Philosopher Can Ask Any Questions That May Not Equally Be Asked By A Tired Child On A Hot Afternoon.

The Traveler Sees What He Sees, The Tourist Sees What He Has Come To See.

It Is Not Only Possible To Say A Great Deal In Praise Of Play; It Is Really Possible To Say The Highest Things In Praise Of It. It Might Reasonably Be Maintained That The True Object Of All Human Life Is Play. Earth Is A Task Garden; Heaven Is A Playground.

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Mikhail Lermontov

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