It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

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.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.