Fairy tales are more than true.

Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.