If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.