The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
New roads; new ruts.
A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
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