Literary Critics

"I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."

"All government is an ugly necessity."

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

"I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument."

"Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."

"Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots."

"The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child."

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

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

"When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any."

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

"When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself."

"The riddle of life is simply this: For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion."

"The object of a ceremony is not to be beautiful, though that is a valuable element. The object of a ceremony is to be ceremonious. Ritual is a need of the human soul — nay, it is rather a need of the human body, like exercise. A man does not take off his hat to a lady because he looks nicer without it; the instance of bald men would be alone sufficient to upset such an explanation. He does it because you must positively do something when you meet a lady, or your whole civilisation goes to pieces; and taking off your hat is easier than taking off your necktie or lying face downwards on the pavement."

"Fine weather encourages individualism. When the whole glittering landscape is cut out as clear as a map—indented by the blue sky as by a blue sea, then each one of us wishes to take his own way, to walk by himself along the roads of the world and conquer for himself the cities of the morning. In the sunlight a man asks for liberty, which is only the divine name for loneliness. But it is in black and bleak conditions that we learn that it is not well for man to be alone; and festivity was discovered in the darkness. Winter encourages that thing called comradeship which modern humanitarians so often seem unable to understand, but which Walt Whitman so wisely perceived to be the permanent foundation of democracy."

"I think that if they gave me leave, Within the world to stand, I would be good through all the day I spent in fairyland. They should not hear a word from me, Of selfishness or scorn, If only I could find the door, If only I were born."

"There is one creed: 'neath no world-terror's wing Apples forget to grow on apple-trees."

"The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee, His hair was like a crown, And all the flowers looked up at him, And all the stars looked down."

"Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."

"Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen."

"There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism."

"He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative."

"The simplification of anything is always sensational."

"The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel."

"Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it."

"The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. ... The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem."

"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."

"The journalists would appear to be in an almost literal sense the priests of the modern world. They may not rise precisely to the tremendous responsibility which was laid upon Peter, but at least it can be said that whatever they bind on earth is bound on earth, and whatever they loose on earth is loosed on earth. They have essentially and absolutely the same functions that were employed by the old priests, but their power for deceit is even greater and their responsibility to the world even less. A comparison between the priests and the journalists would be striking in many points. [...] The priest's influence and power consisted almost entirely in the fact that he was the only man who brought news. [...] the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy."

"Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet."

"When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil’s walking parody On all four-footed things."

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."

"Minus times minus equals plus, The reason for this we need not discuss."

"A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep."

"We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine."

"Now is the age of anxiety."

"Love each other or perish."

"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

"As a poet—not as a citizen—there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption. When it’s corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence."

"A real book reads us."

"Art is born of humiliation."

"You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people."

"What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules — don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters."

"The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears."

"Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond."

"You have to see the sex act comically, as a child."

"There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, "Did you get an erection?" If the answer is "Yes" from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic."

"Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape."

"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen."

"Criticism should be a casual conversation."

"It's impossible to represent a saint. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, in the position of having almost infinitely free will."