There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.