“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past”

“I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

“I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, that thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called 'Paradox Lost'.”

“And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.”

“There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.”

“There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men... these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey... I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back.”

“I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.”