“To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

“Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame.”

“To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without - our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.”

“It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.”

“He...preferred always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more refined...”

“Los libros son un refugio, una especie de refugio claustral que nos alejan de las vulgaridades del mundo actual”

“Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. ”