Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

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

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.

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.

A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.