Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.

No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room. . . .

The ideas of things intellectually known pass into the substance of the intellect much more than do foods into the substance of the body.

The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

[The imagination] . . . inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and . . . a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.