Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and not tried. 

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom.  They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion. 

Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But 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. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution [I would say reformation; revolutions tend to pull up or burn the fences RK]. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.

Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you - did he ever convince anybody - did he ever for one mad moment convince himself - that it must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? ... Herbert Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason that he refrained from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman with different tastes.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

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.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions

When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? --that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, anyone can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.