Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value of any of them is that they bear the image of the king.