A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.

Youth is insolent; it is its right - its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.