It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.

Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.