Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

[Paradox is] truth standing on its head to gain attention.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.