1. "A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive."
2. “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
3. ”A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying: `Of course I do not like green cheese: I am very fond of brown sherry.'”
4. ”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.”
5. "All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing."
6. "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."
7. ”An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
8. ”And a strange music went with him,
Loud and yet strangely far;
The wild pipes of the western land,
Too keen for the ear to understand...
9. "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."
10. “Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally remains mysterious.”
11. “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”
12. ”Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
13. "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."
14. “Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”
15. “Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.”
16. “Coincidences are spiritual puns.”
17. ”Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
18. "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."
19. "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."
20. ”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.”
21. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
22. "Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
23. ”For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.”
24. “Happiness is a mystery like religion, and it should never be rationalized.”
25. "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."
26. “I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.”
27. "I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess."
28. "Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."
29. “In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.”
30. ”It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”
31. “It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.”
32. “Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”
33. ”Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
34. “Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.”
35. “Logic and truth ... have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs ... Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding out truth; on the contrary, truth is a necessary instrument for using logic--for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth ... Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”
36. ”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.”
37. “Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”
38. "Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink."
39. “Man seems capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.”
40. "Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
41. "Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before."
42. "My country, right or wrong" is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
43. “New roads; new ruts.”
44. “Nowadays a citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.”
45. “Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth.”
46. “One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”
47. ”One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.”
48. “People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”
49. ”Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”
50. "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
51. "Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it."
52. “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
53. "The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce."
54. “The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force the thing becomes a pressure, and produces definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
55. "The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist."
56. "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."
57. "The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man."
58. ”The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.”
59. "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."
60. "The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."
61. “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”
62. “The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.”
63. “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.”
64. "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
65. "The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
66. ”The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
67. "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."
68. "The past is not what it was."
69. ”The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”
70. "There are in this world of ours only two kinds of speakers. The first is the man who is making a good speech and won't finish. The second is the man who is making a bad speech and can't finish. The latter is the longer."
71. “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”
72. "There are two kinds of fires. the Bad Fire and the Good Fire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, of things that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things, of things that we do want."
73. "There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death."
74. "There are some desires that are not desirable."
75. "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."
76. "There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes."
77. "There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there."
78. “The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.”
79. "The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
80. ”There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet."
81. "There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth."
82. ”There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”
83. “There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
84. “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."
85. ”The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
86. ”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.”
87. "The true object of all human life is play. Earth s a task garden; heaven is a playground."
88. "The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea."
89. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”
90. "The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings."
91. "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
92. “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.”
93. “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.”
94. “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”
95. “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”
96. “To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.”
97. “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
98. "To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea."
99. "Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it."
100. "Truth is stranger than fiction, but that may well be because we have made fiction to suit ourselves."
101. "Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are."
102. ”You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”
103. "We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera."
104. ”We should be startled by the sun, not the eclipse.”
105. "When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any."
106. "When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale."
107. “White...is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black...God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”
108. “You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”
