There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.

If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement ... collapsed like a house of cards.

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

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.