People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

Surprise is the secret of joy.

There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.

Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.