We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

If the English can survive their food, they can survive anything.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.

Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.

People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.