"What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world."

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.

-Autobiography (1936)

"When we set the poor man free, it nearly always means that we set him free to learn from us. It ought to mean sometimes that we set him free to teach us."

Now there is about all ideas of emancipation or enlightenment, all preaching of freedom to the captive or giving sight to the blind, a certain recurrent perplexity or peril. And it is this: that the emancipator generally means one who brings his own special type of emancipation. The man bringing light brings his own special patent electric-light, and puts out all the previous candles. When we set the poor man free, it nearly always means that we set him free to learn from us. It ought to mean sometimes that we set him free to teach us. But we should be rather startled if he tried it on.

-August 1, 1908, Illustrated London News

"Eternal human nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth. To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth."

Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to Shaw being on Shakespeare's shoulders is a consideration for the sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic objection to anyone being on anyone else's shoulders. Eternal human nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth. To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future because they know that they have done nothing but evil in the past.

-Avowals and Denials (1934)

On the difference between Christ and Satan

A god can be humble, a devil can only be humbled

-The Ball and the Cross (1909)

"...the children of this world are in their generation infinitely more sensitive than the children of light."

Dickens was not a saintly child, after the style of Little Dorrit or Little Nell. He had not, at this time at any rate, set his heart wholly upon higher things, even upon things such as personal tenderness or loyalty. He had been, and was, unless I am very much mistaken, sincerely, stubbornly, bitterly ambitious. He had, I fancy, a fairly clear idea previous to the downfall of all his family's hopes of what he wanted to do in the world, and of the mark that he meant to make there. In no dishonourable sense, but still in a definite sense, he might, in early life, be called worldly; and the children of this world are in their generation infinitely more sensitive than the children of light. A saint after repentance will forgive himself for a sin; a man about town will never forgive himself for a faux pas. There are ways of getting absolved for murder; there are no ways of getting absolved for upsetting the soup. This thin-skinned quality in all very mundane people is a thing too little remembered; and it must not be wholly forgotten in connection with a clever, restless lad who dreamed of a destiny. That part of his distress which concerned himself and his social standing was among the other parts of it the least noble; but perhaps it was the most painful. For pride is not only, as the modern world fails to understand, a sin to be condemned; it is also (as it understands even less) a weakness to be very much commiserated.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

This is, indeed, the supreme absurdity of the modern world, that it imagines that it can introduce anarchy into the intellect without introducing anarchy into the commonwealth.

-August 4, 1906, Illustrated London News

Being educated [means] reading the newspapers. Being properly educated means not believing newspapers after you have read them.

-quoted in The Boston Globe in 1921

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 be a progressive.

-November 8, 1924, Illustrated London News

"...with the authority of a close student of the work, I assure the author of it that if he imagines that he understands the character of Candida he is quite mistaken."

How I wish I could go to Chicago and see this:

Shaw vs. Chesterton: The Debate

Speaking of Shaw, I came across this paragraph from an article on Chesterton from 1905 that I found very amusing, discussing and quoting from one of Chesterton's reviews on a play by Shaw. :-)

Perhaps, however, the most characteristic passage in Mr. Chesterton's critique is that in which he takes issue with Mr. Bernard Shaw in regard to the real character of Candida. One would suppose that Mr. Shaw's view of such a matter would be entitled to some weight—that the creator of a character in a play would be able to put his finger with some degree of certainty on the trait or traits which that character was intended to embody or illustrate. But Mr. Chesterton makes no such concession to the playright. With an effrontery as audacious as it is amusing he says that ''Mr. Shaw's mistakes about the meaning of his own plays arise from the same source as his Shakespearian errors—lack of warmth and poesy." Thus "Candida" always appeared to Mr. Chesterton ''not only as the noblest work of Mr. Shaw, but as one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of modern plays; a most square and manly piece of moral truth." And, he goes on, "with the authority of a close student of the work, I assure the author of it that if he imagines that he understands the character of Candida he is quite mistaken." Quoting then from Mr. Shaw's account, as given by Mr. Huneker, of Candida's character, Mr. Chesterton controverts with no little skill the dramatist's analysis of the lady's philosophy of life, maintaining that Candida knew, as all sane people know, that "convention" is a thing quite as real as "nature," perhaps much more real.

-The Book Buyer: A Monthly Review of American and Foreign Literature, Volumes 30-33 (1905)

"...one advantage of a man ceasing to doubt about religion is that he is much more free to doubt about everything else."

...one advantage of a man ceasing to doubt about religion is that he is much more free to doubt about everything else. All the nineteenth-century sceptics about the other world were dupes about this world. They accepted everything that was fashionable as if it were final...

-As I Was Saying (1936)

The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and its suits me"; the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

-G.K.C. as M.C. (1929), "Introduction to the Book of Job"

(This particular introduction to Job originally published in 1907)