Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.
Satan fell by the force of gravity.
The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on ach...
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.
England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the wor...
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries ...
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.
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.
Theosophists for instance will preach an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people w...
It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.
Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.
If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other se...
All that is mere rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who admits there can be devils but denies...
...It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a b...
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
