Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.

...in some situations winning consist[s] of disentangling oneself.