To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.

I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.

[On common water.] Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.

The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.