Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.

I am looking for my wife, whom I suspect to have been carried off by a devil, poor fellow!

When you consider that presidents and chief-justices and archbishops and kings and statesmen are human beings like you and me and the laundryman, the thought becomes too horrible for humanity to face.

The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.

There is, moreover, a sign by which you may distinguish Thragnar. For if you deny what he says, he will promptly concede you are in the right. This was the curse put upon him by Miramon Lluagor, for a detection and a hindrance.” “By that unhuman trait,” says Jurgen, “ Thragnar ought to be very easy to distinguish.

I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time’s toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.

Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn’t I have changed a trifle?

I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books – brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills – and as immortal.