“Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.”

I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.

It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

I believe that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.’

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.

I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.

The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance – the revolt of the soul against the intellect.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.