“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

You can still die when the sun is shining.

And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

In the particular is contained the universal.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

This body of ours has one fault: the more you indulge it, the more things it discovers to be essential to it. It is extraordinary how it likes being indulged.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

God gave them [the discoveries] to me; how can I sell them to someone else?

I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

The greatest discovery in life is self-discovery. Until you find yourself you will always be someone else. Become yourself.

I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover – the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.