This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.