Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
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Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
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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.
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A room without books is like a body without a soul.
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Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
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The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.
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The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.
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But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
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The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
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Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
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An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.
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All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
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Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
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An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.
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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
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By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
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Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
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I believe in getting into hot water it keeps you clean.
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The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
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I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
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Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
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It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
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Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized.
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People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.
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A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes American bars with an axe. In these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. And for this reason: If a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional; something he does not expect every hour of the day; something which, unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary.
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