The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

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.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned