There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

“Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.” 

“The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”

“The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.” 

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

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

“There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.” 

“I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.” 

“There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.”

“Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship.

For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.”

“Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.” 

“It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men – so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. “I say God is One,” and “I say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.” 

“A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix up everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street.” 

“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.” 

“Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.” 

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” 

“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.” 

“Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.”

“The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.” 

“Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.”

“By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.” 

“And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.”

“The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.” 

The only object of liberty is life.” 

“The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.” 

“Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.”

“Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.” 

“Without authority there is no liberty. Freedom is doomed to destruction at every turn, unless there is a recognized right to freedom. And if there are rights, there is an authority to which we appeal for them.”

“The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. 

“A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.

“A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.” 

Moderns have not the moral courage, as a rule, to avow the sincere spiritual bias behind their fads; they become insincere even about their sincerity. Most modern liberality consists of finding irreligious excuses for religious bigotry. The earlier type of bigot pretended to be more religious than he really was. The later type pretends to be less religious than he really is. He does not wear a mask of piety, but rather a mask of impiety 

“A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.”

“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.” 

“I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.” 

“We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.” 

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

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.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

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.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

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.

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 way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. 

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.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.