“Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.”
– “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” Orthodoxy
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
– “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Orthodoxy
“The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”
– G.F.Watts
“The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.”
– “On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small,” Heretics
“It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.”
– “H.G. Wells and the Giants,” Heretics
“There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.”
– “The Fear of the Past,” What’s Wrong with the World
“I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.”
– Illustrated London News, Aug. 31, 1912
“There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.”
– “The Poet and the Cheese,” A Miscellany of Men