if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

You can't really study people; you can only get to know them.

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.