He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
I am not good at deception,' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing. Right, my boy, right,' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.
No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.
Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man." Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth. "Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!" "Every man is dangerous," said the o...
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.
Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said: "I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again." One of the tall men looked at him wi...
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE. Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange...
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up.
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of ...
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the ...
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?
The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the tr...
