Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages...
To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.
Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.
Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker’s mind.
Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? – Experience, old people’s experience.
We invent the past and remember the future.
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.
The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...
Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.
As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.