Great Throughts Treasury

"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

"One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge."

"A cat is only technically an animal, being divine."

"Almost any game with any ball is a good game."

"As we approached Esher, a policeman in a steel helmet held up his hand and called out: Take cover in Esher. Air raid signaled. It was then a quarter to twelve. We drove up to an inn and went into the lounge. Deciding to have some coffee, I went in search of the waiter and found him in the bar. Not for another quarter of an hour, he said to me as I entered. (Even during an air raid the licensing laws must be respected.) I explained to him I did not want strong drink, but only coffee, and, while waiting for the coffee, my friend and I went out on the steps to look up at the lovely and innocent sky. Under such a sky war and air raids seemed utterly incredible. Get back under cover, an air-warden ordered us. . ."

"Doubt and despair, like hope, are born in imagination."

"Comparatively few people during war time regard expenditure on war as ruinous. During peace time, however, thousands of people?some of them among the most influential in politics?are to be heard declaring the expenditure on making England a land fit for ordinary human beings to live in would be ruinous. This does not make sense to me. It seems to me that if a country took social progress as seriously as it takes war, and in the same self-sacrificing spirit, it would find a similar means of paying for it."

"Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left."

"C-3 kindness is too often A-1 cruelty. If the birds could speak, who doubts that they would begin their morning chant with a prayer to us to abandon out well-meant efforts to protect them?"

"Coleridge says that to bait a mouse-trap is as much as to say to the mouse, 'Come and have a piece of cheese,' and then, when it accepts the invitation, to do it to death is a betrayal of the laws of hospitality."

"Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long."

"Every day, life, as we see it reflected in the newspapers, becomes more and more like a novel written by Edgar Wallace."

"Few of the men I know seem to have any wish to live even to be 90; and still fewer women. This may be largely due to fear of infirmity and the loss of friends. Or it may be due in some measure to the wave of pessimism that has been sweeping over Europe in the present century. Even in the present age, however, the dread of growing old is far from being universal. Many elderly men are now seeking to prolong their lives through gland treatments, and, if the operation were not so expensive it is possible that we should see queues of aged men lining up outside the doors of the rejuvenators."

"Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead."

"Games are the last resource of those who do not know how to idle."

"I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear."

"Happy is the father whose child finds his attempts to amuse it amusing."

"However this may be, I never could read a library book without feeling as if I were eating off somebody else?s plate."

"I am not decrying the ideal of citizenship of the world. I believe that Mr. Wells is right in his passionate desire to see us all conscious or world-citizenship. I hold, however, that ordinary men would not become better citizens of the world if they ceased to be patriotic lovers of their own country. There is no necessary conflict between world-citizenship and patriotism?between national independence and collaboration in a World State. Patriotism in the form of Jingoism is, I agree, a pestilence. But patriotism, freed from its associated evils, is a force that strengthens the character of a people, and so enables it to play a finer part in the civilization of the world at large."

"I make no protest against the incursions of scholars into the world of myths, but, on the whole, I do not care for their company."

"I believe that without variety of opinion life would be intolerable?especially without variety of opinion about trifles."

"I sometimes wonder whether one of the chief services that trash does us is not that it shows us how good books are by comparison. I often take two books to bed with me, one trashy and the other good. After reading the trashy book, for a time, I turn to the good book?say Pride and Prejudice. How absorbing, how exciting it seems! I begin to wonder why I have ever wasted my time over trashy books?books without character, books of mechanical nonsense. After such a book Plato?s Apology seems a thriller and Sir Thomas Brown?s Religio Medici a book that cannot be laid down till the last page is reached."

"If nobody bought books except those who read them, the publishers of some of those cheap editions of the popular classics would also be leaner and sadder men."

"If we allow nationalism to be given a bad name, we may conclude that the world would be better without it and make futile plans for the world of the future as a result of ignoring the fact that patriotism is a necessity of human nature."

"If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats."

"In order to see birds it is necessary to become part of the silence."

"It is extraordinarily easy to persuade people that other people ought to work honestly, but it is not always easy to persuade them that they themselves ought to work honestly. If you go into the great manufacturing towns and visit an engineering works of a shipyard or a silversmith?s, you will see men working as hard and as honestly, I am sure, as men have ever worked since Eden. Nor is the honest manufacturer extinct, or the honest butcher, or the honest author, or the honest publican. There are far more honest men alive than ever get mentioned in the papers. You can recognise them by the fact that they seldom waste their time in accusing other people of being lazy. It is the laziest members of the upper and middle classes who most often accuse the working classes who are most firmly convinced that nobody outside their own ranks ever does an honest day?s work for a living. The trouble is that, in modern times, more and more men are discouraged from doing their best work by the suspicion that, if they do, some one else will cheat them out of their just reward, whether for the manufacturer of for the shopkeeper or for the artisan. If we can establish the principle of the just reward we shall be in a position to defeat the principle of the Devil take the hindmost in the affairs of the world at large. Except in a world that, at least aims at the establishment of the just reward, the rich man and other poor man alike must live in chains."

"It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf."

"It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that one has never heard before."

"It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering."

"If you look up a dictionary of quotations you will find few reasons for a sensible man to desire to become wealthy."

"International sport is war without shooting."

"It is in games that many men discover their paradise."

"It is not the chief end of man, and it is not nearly so good a sign as many people have contended that, in a world that needs to be reconstructed all round, tens of thousands of people are utterly indifferent to any sort of reconstruction but the construction of English cricket. A Chancellor of the Exchequer can fumble incompetently with a million pounds amid general apathy while a fielder who fumbles with the ball becomes the object of barracking."

"It is only in literature that coincidences seem unnatural."

"It is still an instinct in many Christian places to turn Christmas into a general orgy?to make it a day on which one bows down and worships the human maw. (And there are worse things in the world than brandy sauce)."

"Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about."

"It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are human beings."

"Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with."

"Let a thoroughly bad man become religious without changing his nature, and there is no knowing what he will do."

"Liberty is not a way of working out men?s destinies for them, but a way of enabling them to work out their own destinies."

"Let no one suppose that I am inviting anyone to give up literature for trash. I am merely urging that trash has a legitimate place in reading. To read trash all the time is, of course, to miss nine-tenths of the pleasures of literature. But I do not think, as some schoolmaster used to seem to think, that to read a fair amount of trash is to destroy one?s taste for literature. After all, we can spend years enjoying music-hall songs and at the same time become passionate lovers of Handel and Bach. Taste is none the worse for an admixture of a little bad taste."

"Loudly as many of us protest against noise, we know in our hearts that the really terrifying thing is silence."

"Make Utility clothes the fashion and all the male sex, with the exception of a few Irish eccentrics like the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Shaw will love them. The truth is, men do not care about clothes."

"Morals, like laws, were invented for our neighbors, and it is out secret conviction that we ourselves could get along without them."

"Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve."

"Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them."

"Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The thing that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them."

"Most of us can remember a time when a birthday - especially if it was one's own - brightened the world as if a second sun has risen."

"No doubt there are other important things in life besides conflict, but there are not many other things so inevitably interesting. The very saints interest us most when we think of them as engaged in a conflict with the Devil."