Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
"This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."
We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and adapt ourselves to changing circumstances.
A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.
Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted.
Joy is the triumph of life; it is the sign that we are living our true life as spiritual beings.
The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.
Man will never be entirely willing to give up this world for the next nor the next world for this.
A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.
Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.
It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.
In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted.
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.
The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive.
Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.
Faith is an act of self-consecration, in which the will, the intellect, and the affections all have their place.
The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.
The statistics of suicide show that, for non-combatants at least, life is more interesting in war than in peace.
Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.
It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.
Beautiful thoughts hardly bring us to God until they are acted upon. No one can have a true idea of right until he does it.
Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.
Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.
Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing.
I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.
Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.
Let us remember, when we are inclined to be disheartened, that the private soldier is a poor judge of the fortunes of a great battle.
Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.
Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.
When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve, "My dear, we live in an age of transition."
It is becoming impossible for those who mix at all with their fellow-men to believe that the grace of God is distributed denominationally.
All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.
Each generation takes a special pleasure in removing the household gods of its parents from their pedestals, and consigning them to the cupboard.
The right use of leisure is no doubt a harder problem than the right use of our working hours. The soul is dyed the color of its leisure thoughts.
The command, 'Be fruitful and multiply', was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two persons.
Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.
We should think of the church as an orchestra in which the different churches play on different instruments while a Divine Conductor calls the tune.
Faith always contains an element of risk, of venture; and we are impelled to make the venture by the affinity and attraction which we feel in ourselves.
Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.
Action is the normal completion of the act of will which begins as prayer. That action is not always external, but it is always some kind of effective energy.
Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.
God does not always punish a nation by sending it adversity. More often He gives the oppressors their hearts' desire, and sends leanness withal into their soul.
Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or other; and even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is habitable.