The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.