“The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;Round us in antic order their crippled vices came—Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.”

“Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.”

“What is the modern mind?" asked Grant."Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive --and faces the facts of life seriously." At this moment another roar of laughter came from within.”

“There is no harm in our criticizing foreigners, if only we would also criticize ourselves. In other words, the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old humility.”

“Here dies another dayDuring which I have had eyes, ears, hands And the great world round me;And with tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed two?”

“What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. Theyhave not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.”

“Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.”