Emotions and Feelings

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

But time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly, like a snake.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

Humor is hope’s companion in arms. It is not brash, it is not cheap, it is not heartless. Among other things, I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit.

Humor is hope’s companion in arms. It is not brash, it is not cheap, it is not heartless. Among other things, I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

Humor is but another weapon against the universe.

Among all kinds of writing, there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in works of humor, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Be winged arrows, aiming at fulfillment and goal, even though you will tire without having reached the mark.