It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.

Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.

To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.