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

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

People that insist upon drinking and driving, are putting the quart before the hearse.

A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.