It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.

Old stories often turn out to be true.

It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray's Inn Road will never find these secrets elsewhere.

The saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.

If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.