As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I.

Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore! Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.