Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

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

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

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.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.