Sublime

His really sound and essential conception of Liberty, “Turning to scorn with lips divine The falsehood of extremes,” is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century.

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

The chief English fault, especially in the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in thought–which some call dogma.

He would have been the first to disclaim that he had any special psychological insight. But he was the most intelligent of men, he had lived with his eyes open and read a lot, and he had obtained a good generalized sense of human nature—robust, indulgent, satirical, and utterly free from moral vanity. He was spiritually candid as few men are (I dou

All men are mad but the humorist, who cares for nothing and possesses everything.

The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim.

A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amus

the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humour – too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust, – and a critical judgment which, if