The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.