26 quotes found
“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”
“Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.”
“We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.”
“There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as the enormous importance attached to immediate victory.”
“Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.”
“In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.”
“of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.”
“The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being...”
“Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope...”
“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ag...”
“The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas...”
“When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward in a word, a man....”
“The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that m...”
“Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have s...”
“What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.”
“But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of ...”
“When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you,be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition oflife.”
“Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry ma...”
“In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this ma...”
“One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys sel-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be m...”
“I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.”