The most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

If we are deprived of hope as well as fear, we are compensated by being given an almost endless patience for enduring or simply for waiting.

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.