Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.