Sublime

A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.

therefore he succeeds, because poetry is so much nearer to reality than all the other human occupations.

What is socially humdrum is produced by what is individually heroic; and a city is made not merely of citizens but knight–errants.

Come down to the nearest decent inhabitable pub. This is a case for beer.”

The truth is that our public life consists almost exclusively of small men. Our public men are small because they have to prove that they are in the commonplace interpretation clever, because they have to pass examinations, to learn codes of manners, to imitate a fixed type. It is in private life that we find the great characters.

Exactly what gives its real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century; repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Cre

In short, he is simply a sane man, and of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind.

When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.