The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.
Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.
Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.
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.
Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit -- and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist -- and a Catholic.
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.
If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue.
Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.
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 object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.
Longer Version:
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
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 poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.
A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.
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.
It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
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.
A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.
Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.
Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.
A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.
But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.
In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?
My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
To be simple is the best thing in the world.
Longer Version:
To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.
The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
The word good has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
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.
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
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.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
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.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.