 Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance. |
| Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true. |
| Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art. |
| No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism. |
| Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person. |
| A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it. |
| Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. |
| The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so. |
| The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot. |
| 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. |
| To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. |
| Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself. |
| Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. |
| Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater. |
| 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. |
| True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values. |
| Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. |
| I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour. |
| We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form. |
