There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

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.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.