I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.

[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.