A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason

It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.