Man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

It is amusing to note that when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horror of "plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic, rhetoric," which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoric as Ruskin himself could have managed.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end.