A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.
If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.
A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.
Men rush toward complexity; but yearn for simplicity.
If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.
Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.
We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue.
I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.
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