The only object of liberty is life.” 

“The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.” 

“Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.”

“Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.” 

“Without authority there is no liberty. Freedom is doomed to destruction at every turn, unless there is a recognized right to freedom. And if there are rights, there is an authority to which we appeal for them.”

“The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. 

“A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.

“A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.” 

Moderns have not the moral courage, as a rule, to avow the sincere spiritual bias behind their fads; they become insincere even about their sincerity. Most modern liberality consists of finding irreligious excuses for religious bigotry. The earlier type of bigot pretended to be more religious than he really was. The later type pretends to be less religious than he really is. He does not wear a mask of piety, but rather a mask of impiety 

“A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.”

“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.” 

“I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.” 

“We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.” 

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

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

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

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

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.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. 

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

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.

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.”