Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Surprise is the secret of joy.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.