When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.