"Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt."

"What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place."

"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."

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."

"People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make."

"If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not."

"Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty."

"The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them."

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past."

"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"

"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."

"The only defensible war is a war of defense."

"The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it."

"Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods."

"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."

"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper."

"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head."

"A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice."

"Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men."

"Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel."

"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist."

"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life."

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."

"Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position."

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."

"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

"Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."

"A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt."

"Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich."

"It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."

"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."

"Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it."

"A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything."

"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."

"A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things."

"And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet."

"You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution."

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."

"To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it."

"The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in."

"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."

"An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."

"Coincidences are spiritual puns."

"Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."

"The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."