“The louder our world today is, the deeper God seems to remain in silence. Silence is the language of eternity; noise passes.”

“Who are you, world, that you should frighten me?”

“Pan and the CherriesI RECOGNIZED him by his skips and hops,And by his hair I knew that he was Pan.Through sunny avenues he ran,And leapt for cherries to the red tree-tops.Upon his fleece were pearling water dropsLike little silver stars. How pure he was! And this was when my spring was arched with blue. Now, seeing a cherry of a smoother gloss,He seized it, and bit the kernel from the pulp.I watched him with great joy ... I came anigh ...He spat the kernel straight into my eye.I ran to kill Pan with my knife!He stretched his arm out, swirled--And the whole earth whirled! Let us adore Pan, god of all the world!”

“It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.”

“Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania — then might I write largely enough for our subjects.”

“When, upon the closed system of normal preoccupations, a story of a sea serpent appears, it is inhospitably treated. To us of the wider cordialities, it has recommendations for kinder reception. I think that we shall be noted in recognitions of good works for our bizarre charities.”

“[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”