“The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.”

“It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.”

“He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.”

“A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.”

“A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.”

“Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”