Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

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

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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.