The living have never shown me how to live.

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned