"All Things Considered" by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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• "I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book."
• "It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous."
• "It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance."
• "That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible."
• "One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time."
• "In these essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick."

• "It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite."
• "The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know."
• "To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris."
• "The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion"
• "the essence of religious persecution is this: that the man who happens to have material power in the State, either by wealth or by official position, should govern his fellow-citizens not according to their religion or philosophy, but according to his own"
• "These people ask the poor to accept in practice what they know perfectly well that the poor would not accept in theory. That is the very definition of religious persecution."
• "That is the horrible thing about our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society."
• "The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more nameless than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past; but he is more of a coward."
• "The elaborate machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solely in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants. We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking modesty of tyrants."
• "In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought."
• "if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish."
• "Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks."
• "thread the labyrinths of the sweet insanity"
• "We have at the very worst a splendid hypocrisy of humour. We conceal our sorrow behind a screaming derision. You speak of people who laugh through their tears"
• "In order to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humorous. One must also be vulgar"
• "Bad cheese symbolises the change from the inorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself."
• "Every man who is married knows quite well, not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but that no man can conceivably ever have done so."
• "If we are really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself, we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people, but in the literature which the people studies."
• "the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is"
• "There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men. They are much more wild than the wildest romances of chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract. Moreover, the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry; the religious tracts are about religion. But these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed."
• "They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books."
• "To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide."
• "I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back."
• "It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation."
• "The days of idealism and superstition are over."
• "the horrible mysticism of money"
• "For when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility."
• "At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness."
• "In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman."
• "most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences--things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train?"
• "the typical nuisance of daily life"
• "There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic--eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing--such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife."
• "The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose."
• "I pointed out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out easily. "But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating."
• "I have no doubt that every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring."
• "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
• "There is really a vast amount of corruption and hypocrisy in our election politics; about the most honest thing in the whole mess is the canvassing."
• "Of course, politics and journalism are, as it happens, very vulgar. But their vulgarity is not the worst thing about them. Things are so bad with both that by this time their vulgarity is the best thing about them. Their vulgarity is at least a noisy thing; and their great danger is that silence that always comes before decay."
• "The conversational persuasion at elections is perfectly human and rational; it is the silent persuasions that are utterly damnable."
• "All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth."
• "For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd; above all, they must think it startling."
• "optimists are more practical reformers than pessimists."
• "Superficially, one would imagine that the railer would be the reformer; that the man who thought that everything was wrong would be the man to put everything right. In historical practice the thing is quite the other way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really makes them better."
• "Everywhere the man who alters things begins by liking things. And the real explanation of this success of the optimistic reformer, of this failure of the pessimistic reformer, is, after all, an explanation of sufficient simplicity. It is because the optimist can look at wrong not only with indignation, but with a startled indignation. When the pessimist looks at any infamy, it is to him, after all, only a repetition of the infamy of existence."
• "But the optimist sees injustice as something discordant and unexpected, and it stings him into action. The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be surprised at it."
• "The pessimist resents evil (like Lord Macaulay) solely because it is a grievance. The optimist resents it also, because it is an anomaly; a contradiction to his conception of the course of things."
• "When people have got used to unreason they can no longer be startled at injustice."
• "If a man must needs be conceited, it is certainly better that he should be conceited about some merits or talents that he does not really possess. For then his vanity remains more or less superficial"
• "A man will plume himself because he is not bad in some particular way, when the truth is that he is not good enough to be bad in that particular way."
• "Some priggish little clerk will say, "I have reason to congratulate myself that I am a civilised person, and not so bloodthirsty as the Mad Mullah." Somebody ought to say to him, "A really good man would be less bloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not because you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal less of a man."
• "True religion, perhaps, is above idolatry. But you are below idolatry. You are not holy enough yet to worship a lump of stone."
• "Before we congratulate ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are we without the fault because we have the opposite virtue? Or are we without the fault because we have the opposite fault?"
• "It is a good thing assuredly, to be innocent of any excess; but let us be sure that we are not innocent of excess merely by being guilty of defect."
• "penetrated through and through with a mystical charity, with a psychological tenderness?"
• "It is easy enough to be refined about things that do not matter"
• "Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty."
• "These people will, of course, think too much of our failure, just as they thought too much of our success."
• "As long as the game was a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, every one wants to look at it. When it was frivolous it may have won Waterloo: when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein."
• "If a man fell out of the moon into the town of Paris he would know that it was the capital of a great nation. If, however, he fell (perhaps off some other side of the moon) so as to hit the city of London, he would not know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any rate, he would not know that the nation was so great as it is."
• "Real democrats always insist that England is an aristocratic country. Real aristocrats always insist (for some mysterious reason) that it is a democratic country."
• "To say that this is not aristocracy is simply intellectual impudence."
• "I think I could be more comfortable in the Fleet Prison, in an English way of comfort, than just under the statue of Voltaire."
• "I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity."
• "If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things. The chief object of education is to unlearn all the weariness and wickedness of the world and to get back into that state of exhilaration we all instinctively celebrate when we write by preference of children and of boys."
• "in any case, I would insist that people should have so much simplicity as would enable them to see things suddenly and to see things as they are."
• "I do not even mind whether they can put two and two together in the mathematical sense; I am content if they can put two and two together in the metaphorical sense."
• "And London is far more difficult to see properly than any other place. London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation."
• "It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan."
• "International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations"
• "And in the case of national character this can be seen in a curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate."
• "their obscenity is the expression of their passionate love of dragging all things into the light."
• "He is admiring something he does not understand. He is reaping where he has not sown, and taking up where he has not laid down; he is trying to taste the fruit when he has never toiled over the tree."
• "Not only his pocket, but his soul is hurt. You have wounded his ideal."
• "under all their pageant of chivalry men are not only beasts, but even hunted beasts."
• "I do not know much of humanity, especially when humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the human soul, and when it is meant to depress it."
• "These people have some right to be terrible in art, for they have been terrible in politics. They may endure mock tortures on the stage; they have seen real tortures in the streets. They have been hurt for the idea of Democracy."
• "This restless people seeks to keep itself in a perpetual agony of the revolutionary mood."
• "When a thing of the intellect is settled it is not dead: rather it is immortal. The multiplication table is immortal, and so is the fame of Shakespere. But the fame of Zola is not dead or not immortal; it is at its crisis, it is in the balance; and may be found wanting."
• "But Shakspere is not a living question: he is a living answer."
• "But nobody could say that a statue of Shakespere, even fifty feet high, on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, could define Shakespere's position. It only defines our position towards Shakspere. It is he who is fixed; it is we who are unstable."
• "As to the affair of the English monument to Shakespere, every people has its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be said for ours."
• "There is the French monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, badly done. And there is the English monumental method, the great English way with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all."
• "A statue may be dignified; but the absence of a statue is always dignified. For my part, I feel there is something national, something wholesomely symbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakespere."
• "We can only say that he came from nowhere and that he went everywhere."
• "It is the problem of whether the nation shall take one turn of thought or another."
• "I know all the evils of flippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight of virtue. But I prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue and complains bitterly of there being any such thing."
• "I am not reassured, when ethics are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that they are also as grave and sincere as suicide."
• "Macaulay said that the Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Of such substance also was this Puritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than the Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This man actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it."
• "Zola was worse than a pornographer, he was a pessimist. He did worse than encourage sin: he encouraged discouragement."
• "As you will not try to make the best people the most powerful people, persuade yourselves that the most powerful people are the best people."
• "social conceit and exclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition amongst all classes"
• "The Old English University is a playground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a bad thing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if there is a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing class. I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by men who do not know how to play."
• "A good son does not easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but neither does a good son cheerily assert that she is "all right."
• "It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."
• "Humanity, always dreaming of a happy race, free, fantastic, and at ease, has sometimes pictured them in some mystical island, sometimes in some celestial city, sometimes as fairies, gods, or citizens of Atlantis. But one method in which it has often indulged is to picture them as aristocrats, as a special human class that could actually be seen hunting in the woods or driving about the streets."
• "mankind never really admired pride; mankind never had any thing but a scorn for scorn. It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of the spectacle of youth."
• "Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it is not even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate indulgence in a certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose"
• "All this is very human and pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things in the world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility. But if aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of all visions. It is not a working way of doing things to put all your happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them. It is not a working way of managing education to be entirely content with the mere fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the world) given the luckiest boys the jolliest time."
• "Oh what a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not love it!"
• "But the question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we buying? It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave."
• "The question for brave men is not whether a certain thing is increasing; the question is whether we are increasing it."
• "Mr. Will Crooks put it perfectly the other day: "The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door."
• "Theoretically, I suppose, every one would like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would always like to be freed from worrying occupations."
• "Because we are worried about a thing, it does not follow that we are not interested in it. The truth is the other way. If we are not interested, why on earth should we be worried?"
• "Women are worried about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most worried. Women are still more worried about their husbands and their children."
• "Of the two sexes the woman is in the more powerful position. For the average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else. The woman's world is a small one, perhaps, but she can alter it."
• "the staring psychological fact that there are some things that a man or a woman, as the case may be, wishes to do for himself or herself. He or she must do it inventively, creatively, artistically, individually--in a word, badly. Choosing your wife (say) is one of these things."
• "taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do"
• "I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman, as I have said, is a despot; the average man is a serf. I am for any scheme that any one can suggest that will make the average woman more of a despot. So far from wishing her to get her cooked meals from outside, I should like her to cook more wildly and at her own will than she does."
• "Let woman be more of a maker, not less."
• "ironical allegory of most modern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself up and then complaining that he is not free. Some say that such larks retard the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone can advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have the smallest effect one way or the other."
• "The modern notion of impressing the public by a mere demonstration of unpopularity, by being thrown out of meetings or thrown into jail is largely a mistake. It rests on a fallacy touching the true popular value of martyrdom. People look at human history and see that it has often happened that persecutions have not only advertised but even advanced a persecuted creed, and given to its validity the public and dreadful witness of dying men."
• "The truth is that the special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted only happens in the case of extreme persecution. For the fact that the modern enthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he holds only proves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted."
• "that the average man is not impressed with their sacrifices simply because they are not and cannot be more decisive than the sacrifices which the average man himself would make for mere fun if he were drunk. Drunkards would interrupt meetings and take the consequences."
• "Generally, instinctively, in the absence of any special reason, humanity hates the idea of anything being hidden--that is, it hates the idea of anything being successfully hidden. Hide-and-seek is a popular pastime; but it assumes the truth of the text, "Seek and ye shall find."
• "Ordinary mankind (gigantic and unconquerable in its power of joy)"
• "being ignorant is the best and purest preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life"
• "there is a third class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible--caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does not know."
• "I cannot imagine that any human being could think any other human being capable of maintaining the proposition that men ought not to receive money."
• "It is not hidden in order to be revealed: it is hidden in order to be hidden. It is not kept secret because it is a common secret of mankind, but because mankind must not get hold of it. And it is not kept secret because it is too unimportant to be told, but because it is much too important to bear telling."
• "We have an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine."
• "In life it is always the little facts that express the large emotions"
• "A famous and epigrammatic author said that life copied literature; it seems clear that life really caricatures it."
• "Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They learn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, a title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may be unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but they are weak things. They are not Force, and they do not look like Force. They are parts of an idea: of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea."
• "I do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads. It tends moreover (both through its specialisation and through its constant obedience) to a certain loss of real independence and strength of character."
• "But the soldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to something."
• "And as long as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has already accepted its defeat."
• "Energetic people use energy as a means, but only very tired people ever use energy as a reason."
• "Journalists do control public opinion; but it is not controlled by the arguments they publish--it is controlled by the arguments between the editor and sub-editor, which they do not publish."
• "Our public life is conducted privately."
• "A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does not steal."
• "having accomplished nothing but an epic"
• "of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear"
• "When some trick of this sort is played, the newspapers opposed to it always describe it as "a senseless joke." What is the good of saying that? Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its nature a protest against sense. It is no good attacking nonsense for being successfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint a celebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as "Alice in Wonderland." It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny. But the real answer to the affair is not to say that it is nonsensical or even to say that it is not funny, but to point out that it is wrong to spoil statues which belong to other people."
• "If the modern world will not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of resisting the counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a nasty thing in a nice way."
• "the vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar"
• "At no English public school is it even suggested, except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What is suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty not to tell lies."
• "When we say to a child, "You must tell the truth," we do merely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thing we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything"
• "It teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies."
• "It turns a room full of citizens into a room full of barristers."
• "It is customary to remark that modern problems cannot easily be attacked because they are so complex. In many cases I believe it is really because they are so simple. Nobody would believe in such simplicity of scoundrelism even if it were pointed out."
• "We waste our fine intellects in finding exquisite phraseology to fit a man, when in a well-ordered society we ought to be finding handcuffs to fit him."
• "At present it is not we that silence the Press; it is the Press that silences us."
• "an act of very beautiful self-sacrifice, the destruction and surrender of the symbol of personal dignity upon the shrine of public festivity"
• "It takes all sorts to make a world; and it is not in the least necessary that everybody should have that love of subtle and unobtrusive perfections in the matter of manners or literature which does often go with the type of the ethical idealist. It is not in the least desirable that everybody should be earnest. It is highly desirable that everybody should be honest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a coarse and cheerful character."
• "the instinct of democracy is like the instinct of one woman, wild but quite right"
• "We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners."
• "I do not believe there is any harm whatever in reading about murders; rather, if anything, good; for the thought of death operates very powerfully with the poor in the creation of brotherhood and a sense of human dignity."
• "Men can safely see in the papers what they have already seen in the streets."
• "The end of the article which I write is always cut off, and, unfortunately, I belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail is important."
• "Writing anonymously ought to be the exception; writing a signed article ought to be the rule."
• "To-day the editor is not only the organ, but the man who plays on the organ."
• "This is the whole danger of our time. There is a difference between the oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression which seems only too probable in the future. Oppression in the past, has commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple as the oppressed, and as lonely."
• "Let the world live and love"
• "The strong words all are put in; the chain of thought is left out."
• "speeches are growing duller and duller"
• "The speeches in our time are more careful and elaborate, because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard."
• "Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them."
• "The curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer than the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally even stupider."
• "To be simple and to be democratic are two very honourable and austere achievements; and it is not given to all the snobs and self-seekers to achieve them."
• "misrepresentation of speeches is only a part of a vast journalistic misrepresentation of all life as it is"
• "Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is more or less conscious of the difference."
• "To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing."
• "It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean something."
• "You do not cut a man open to find his sins."
• "Science never said that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with everything that we know from physical science."
• "Humanity might have grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way have contradicted the principle of Evolution."
• "Men thought mankind wicked because they felt wicked themselves."
• "Man's primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows."
• "By its nature the evidence of Eden is something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something that one cannot help finding."
• "The only thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we have not got it."
• "The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature."
• "A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art."
• "A man was enlisting as a soldier at Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiry about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial gravity the man wrote down the word "Methuselahite." Whoever looks over such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unless the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist knowledge he could not "place" Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variations of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant. The soldier replied that it was his religion "to live as long as he could."
• "Every day the daily paper reviews some new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as that word "Methuselahite."
• "The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it."
• "How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall? What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf?"
• "What can people mean when they say that science has disturbed their view of sin? What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it? Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do they mean? Did they think that immortality was a gas?"
• "Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all revolutionary."
• "If it was the man's religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he enlisting as a soldier?"
• "My fate in most controversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule that the man with whom I don't agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, and the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him."
• "There is a distinct philosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a serious discussion."
• "So far as a thing is universal it is serious. And so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things."
• "If you take a small thing, it may be entirely serious: Napoleon, for instance, was a small thing, and he was serious: the same applies to microbes. If you isolate a thing, you may get the pure essence of gravity. But if you take a large thing (such as the Solar System) it must be comic, at least in parts. The germs are serious, because they kill you. But the stars are funny, because they give birth to life, and life gives birth to fun."
• "It is the test of a good philosophy whether you can defend it grotesquely. It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."
• "Whatever is cosmic is comic."
• "It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."
• "I conceive myself capable of forming my opinion of Spiritualism without seeing spirits, just as I form my opinion of the Japanese War without seeing the Japanese, or my opinion of American millionaires without (thank God) seeing an American millionaire."
• "The priest calls to the goddess, for the same reason that a man calls to his wife, because he knows she is there."
• "If a man kept on shouting out very loud the single word "Maria," merely with the object of discovering whether if he did it long enough some woman of that name would come and marry him, he would be more or less in the position of the modern spiritualist. The old religionist cried out for his God. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his. The whole point of religion as it has hitherto existed in the world was that you knew all about your gods, even before you saw them, if indeed you ever did."
• "The same vanity and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. Praise them; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know they are there. Do not look for them unless you want them. It annoys them very much."
• "What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity."
• "The man who took the trouble to deduce from the police reports would probably be the man who would take the trouble to deduce further and different things from the evidence. The man who had the sense to form an opinion would be the man who would have the sense to alter it."
• "In the same way, there is in modern discussions of religion and philosophy an absurd assumption that a man is in some way just and well-poised because he has come to no conclusion; and that a man is in some way knocked off the list of fair judges because he has come to a conclusion."
• "It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism."
• "All men that count have come to my conclusion; for if they come to your conclusion they do not count."
• "If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men."
• "It seems to me that what is really wrong with all modern and highly civilised language is that it does so largely consist of dead words."
• "the word "talent" the matter is worse: a talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a symbol of the mental capital committed to an individual at birth."
• "to encourage poetry means merely to advance or assist poetry. But to encourage poetry means properly to put courage into poetry--a fine idea."
• "A certain magistrate told somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she "should always be polite to the police." I do not know whether the magistrate noticed the circumstance, but the word "polite" and the word "police" have the same origin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of the city, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means the representative and guardian of the city, the symbol of human civilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonly connected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politeness without thinking of a policeman"
• "Politeness is not really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness is a policeman."
• "Human history is so rich and complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement or retrogression."
• "For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination."
• "For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not."
• "I used to think that the chief modern danger was a danger of over-civilisation. I am inclined to think now that the chief modern danger is that of a slow return towards barbarism"
• "Civilisation in the best sense merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all externals. Barbarism means the worship of those externals in their crude and unconquered state."
• "The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and is always talking about what he may do."
• "Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas."
• "It is quite a mistake to suppose that, when a man desires an alcoholic drink, he necessarily desires alcohol."
• "Man is always something worse or something better than an animal"
• "no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness--or so good as drink"
• "Certainly the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and especially not caring for the drink."
• "The truth of the matter is really quite simple. An aristocracy is a secret society; and this is especially so when, as in the modern world, it is practically a plutocracy."
• "It was at once apparent, of course, that the thing was a joke. But what was not apparent, what only grew upon the mind with gradual wonder and terror, was the fact that it had its serious side."
• "Dickens was making game, not of places, but of methods. He poured all his powerful genius into trying to make the people ashamed of the methods."
• "the spirit of highly irrelevant realism"
• "Science denounces the idea of a capricious God; but Mr. Yeats's school suggests that in that world every one is a capricious god."
• "If you really read the 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. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve."
• "This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore--the idea that all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative."
• "A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read."
• "The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness; according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about immoral people."
• "The homeless scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that morality is somehow merely a matter of human taste--an accident of psychology. And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme."
• "But that is the modern method: the method of the reverent sceptic. When you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the outside, you pretend that you understand the inside."
• "Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy."
• "Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation."
• "But great poets use the telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something too large for any one to understand, and now again because they are talking about something too small for any one to see."
• "Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas."
• "There is no mark of the immense weak-mindedness of modernity that is more striking than this general disposition to keep up old forms, but to keep them up informally and feebly."
• "We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty."
• "It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet."