When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.

These are the things which might conceivably and truly make men forgive their enemies. We can only turn hate to love by understanding what are the things that men have loved; nor is it necessary to ask men to hate their loves in order to love one another. Just as two grocers are most likely to be reconciled when they remember for a moment that they are two fathers, so two nationals are most likely to be reconciled when they remember (if only for a moment) that they are two patriots.