“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial.

God made food; the devil the cooks.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

Death is what men want when the anguish of living is more than they can bear.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.

Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.