People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
Helen Keller
1874 - 1936. English writer, author of "Heretics", "Orthodoxy", "What`s Wrong With The World", "The Father Brown Mystery Series" and "The Everlasting Man".
1. "You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."
Categories: Truth and Falsity
2. "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
Categories: Intellect, Judgement
3. "To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it."
source: "The Father Brown Mystery Series"
Categories: Richness and Money -:- Wisdom and Stupidity
4. "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."
source: "Man who was Thursday"
Categories: Law and Crime
5. "There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect."
source: "The Defendant"
Categories: Beauty and Ugliness
6. "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
Categories: Defeates and Mistakes
7. "The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact."
source: "Charles Dickens"
Categories: Science and Technology
8. "The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism - the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem."
Categories: God and Religion
9. "The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen."
source: "The Father Brown Mystery Series"
Categories: Reality and Imagination
10. "The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
source: "Orthodoxy"
Categories: Reality and Imagination
11. "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
source: "What's Wrong with the World"
Categories: God and Religion
12. "The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child."
source: "The Victorian Age in Literature"
Categories: Art and Culture
13. "The center of every man's existence is a dream."
Categories: Dreams and Desires
14. "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."
Categories: Friendship and Hostility -:- God and Religion
15. "One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."
source: "The Father Brown Mystery Series"
Categories: Good and Evil
16. "No animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink."
source: "All Things Considered"
Categories: Health and Alcohol
17. "Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?"
Categories: Various
18. "Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?"
19. "Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. "
source: "The Father Brown Mystery Series"
Categories: Various
20. "It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem."
source: "The Father Brown Omnibus"
Categories: Question and Problem
21. "It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake."
source: "Heretics"
Categories: God and Religion
22. "Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."
Categories: Reality and Imagination
23. "Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."
Categories: Authority, Government -:- Education
24. "Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions."
source: "Heretics"
Categories: Manners and Ethics -:- Anger
25. "Art is the signature of man."
source: "The Everlasting Man"
Categories: Art and Culture -:- Human
26. "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."
source: "Orthodoxy"
Categories: Various
27. "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."
Categories: Various
28. "An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity."
source: "The Dagger with Wings"
Categories: Art and Culture
29. "A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard."
Categories: Bravery and Fear -:- Health and Alcohol
30. "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
source: "The Everlasting Man"
Categories: Life and Death -:- Various
31. ""My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober.""
source: "Defendant"
Categories: Patriotism
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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