But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.

Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality - the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.

Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.