I am a vegetarian... between meals. From breakfast to lunch, not a leg of mutton crosses my lips. During all that time I am an earnest and active nutarian, munching away and laying up stores of health.

There are only two ways of governing human beings: the first is called dogmatism and the second despotism. But despotism is easier. For if men are ruled by a king they can forget him; if they are ruled by a creed they have to remember it.

Pleasure in the beautiful is a sacred thing.

A work of art is like a prayer; no sin must be kept back in it, or it becomes false.

In our time we find a great deal of religion in art. In former ages we found a great deal of art in religion. Religion was the orthodoxy of those days: art has become almost the only orthodoxy of these.

Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of Christianity. But it is the ancient Church that can again startle the world with the paradoxes of Christianity.

I could never see why a man who is not free to open his mouth to drink should be free to open it to talk. Talking does far more direct harm to other people.

Great joy has in it the sense of immortality: the triumphant moments of our life may have been only moments, but they were moments of eternity.

All skepticism is like seasickness... If you cannot enjoy the universe, it is better to throw it up; but it will leave you weak and sensitive and any spirit that you touch will infallibly fly to your head.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Half our human effort is wasted on mere transit, transport, and exchange. The commonwealth is a clearinghouse of cases we never open and presents we never enjoy.

It seems to me this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment.

It is vain to learn to enjoy sport, or to enjoy art, or to enjoy festivity, if we have not learned the fundamental function—how to enjoy enjoyment.

The very definition of hell must be energy without joy.

Our particular corner of Christendom can now be taught the history of every civilisation except its own.

There certainly are great important matters upon which many of the great and important religions agree. But the first difficulty is that these are sometimes the very things with which the unifiers of religions disagree.

While we are seeing around us a degree of licence that can rightly be called pagan, we are also seeing a destruction of liberty that is rightly called Puritan. What is bottled up in one place breaks out in another place; only it is the wrong place instead of the right place.

Sociology really does mean waiting in a wild place for something that won't happen.

It is a moral duty to listen to reason, but it is not a moral duty to listen to unreason.

It takes a real politician to say that politics don't matter.

I do not believe that a nation dies save by suicide. To the very last every problem is a problem of will; and if we will we can be whole. But it involves facing our own failures as well as counting our successes.

We have seen the end of the age of Reason; and that we live in the age of Suggestion. Perhaps for the first time, the degradation of Man has been openly declared; in a theory that he can be persuaded without being convinced.

The Church does not crush any man's conscience. It is the man who crushes his conscience and then finds out that it was right, when he has almost forgotten that he had one.

Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things—to blink in a blinding light or laugh when tickled. That is the best of Christmas—it is a startling and disturbing happiness; an uncomfortable comfort.

The idea of embodying goodwill—that is, of putting it into a body—is the huge and primal idea of the Incarnation. A gift of God that can be seen and touched is the whole point of the epigram of the creed. Christ Himself was a Christmas present.

Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind—the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. We are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones.

Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly. He is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold.

As a child I faced a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. >>

The essence of real ritual is that one does something because it signifies something; it may be stiff or slow or ceremonial in form; that depends on the nature of the artistic form. But he does it because it is significant. It is the essence of routine that he does it because it is insignificant.

It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.