The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

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

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.

A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason