All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing – and he won’t be missed either.
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
The SkeletonChattering finch and water-flyAre not merrier than I;Here among the flowers I lieLaughing everlastingly.No: I may not tell the best;Surely, friends, I might have guessedDeath was but the good King’s jest,It was hid so carefully.
A man of science has always been much more of a magician than the priest; since he would control the elements rather than submit to the Spirit who is more elementary than the element.
The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.