Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

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.

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.