All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.

It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.