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the madman of experience;
without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.
not so much a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view.
They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far.
materialism has a sort of insane simplicity.
He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
I do not for the present attempt to prove to Haeckel that materialism is untrue, any more than I attempted to prove to the man who thought he was Christ that he was labouring under an error.
if the man in Hanwell is the real God, he is not much of a god. And, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos.
The parts seem greater than the whole.
A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted.
sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen.
the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.
Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals.
The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment.
For him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself.
mystical egoism of our day.
thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves,
when friends fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the world fail; then when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare, then the great individualistic motto
a man can believe that he is always in a dream. Now, obviously there can be no positive proof given to him that he is not in a dream,
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.
But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity.
certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity.
a serpent with his tail in his mouth.
supercilious theosophists
a degraded animal who destroys even himself.
the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used withou...
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one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them.
cared more for truth than for consistency.
If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the c...
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stereos...
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two different pictures at once and yet sees all the...
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such a thing as fate, but such a thing as ...
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It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man.
can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing.
Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.
Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.
But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable,
the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns.
he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place.
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.
what does he mean??
the virtues are let loose also;
the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.
because they have been isolated from each other and ar...
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attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity.
in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy.
the enemy of the human race-- because he is so human.
Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth. Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth.
righteousness and peace kiss each other.
