Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.
Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.
Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.
It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out.
It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.
There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.
Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.
A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.
In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.