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

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

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.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

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.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

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

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

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.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.