Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

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

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.