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.
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.
Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average person.
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.
It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.
Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.
A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.
Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.
Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.
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.
I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.
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.
Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.
In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.
Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.
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.
Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.
I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.
Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.
