"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
"...all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and (there is) no cause to value one above the other.""
"The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane."
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
"It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism."
"Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent."