He extended his hand: It seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye, said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage exp...
Fine hospitality, said I, to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.
Eight-and-twenty years,' said I, 'I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.' The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . . And how are all things made for man?-- KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discove...
Aren't we all agreed about those things--in theory?'In theory, yes,' said Bobby. 'But not in reality. If every one really wanted to abolish the difference of rich and poor it would be as easy as pie t...
And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he said, in the incapacity to frame delicately different sounding symbols by which thought could be sustained
All the English flowers came from Shakespeare. I don't know what we did before his time.The Secret Places of the Heart
You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity,
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly...
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
What right have they to hope? They work ill and they want the reward of those who work well. The hope of mankind - what is it? That some day the Over-man may come, that some day the inferior, the weak...
We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.
We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians . . . were...
To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw...
This isn't a war, said the artilleryman. It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
They are mad; they are fools, said the Dog-man.
There's lots will take things as they are--fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are so that...
There is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it, but always I fall short...