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

The power of magic has no known limits. A person knows, in a fair way, his own physical capacities, the weight of the blows he can deal, the furthest range of his arrows, the strength of his voice, the speed and endurance of his running; but the reaches of his mind are indefinite and, to his feeling, infinite.

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation.... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all.