The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.