“It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.”

“Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.”

“The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.”

“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”

“Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.”

“The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.”

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.”

“Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.”

“Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.”

“The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.”

“As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.”