What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

Action is the normal completion of the act of will which begins as prayer. That action is not always external, but it is always some kind of effective energy.

To marry is to get a binocular view of life.

Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.

Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.

A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

Faith always contains an element of risk, of venture; and we are impelled to make the venture by the affinity and attraction which we feel in ourselves.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.

Don’t get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.

We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.

The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.

Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

The object of studying philosophy is to know one’s own mind, not other people’s.

All faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.

I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.

The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.

If the universe is running down like a clock, the clock must have been wound up at a date which we could name if we knew it. The world, if it is to have an end in time, must have had a beginning in time.