To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

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

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

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

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it. 

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” 

“It’s not that we don’t have enough scoundrels to curse; it’s that we don’t have enough good men to curse them.” 

“There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.”

“The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.” 

“Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.” 

“Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.” –

“There’d be a lot less scandal if people didn’t idealize sin and pose as sinners.” 

“All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.” 

“I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.” 

“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

“To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.”

“Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.”

“The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.”

“All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.”

“The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.”

“What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.”

“In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.”

“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”

“If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.”

“There are some desires that are not desirable.” 

“It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”

“The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.” 

“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”

“Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.” 

“What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.”

“If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.”

“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.” 

“One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.” 

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.” 

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

“It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“Theology is only thought applied to religion.”

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.” 

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.” 

“Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.”

“A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.”

“Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.” 

“The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.”

“A good man’s work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.”

“Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.”