The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.

His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.

Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.

A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.

We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.