Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.