God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles?

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.