None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

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.

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

How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.