If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.

There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.