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

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.

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

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

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.