What they were aware of was the dumb, numb, cold, heavy downward drag of the vast undersea forces that are sub-human; chemical forces, that belong to… - John Cowper Powys

As he contemplated the loveliness of her figure, it struck him as infinitely pathetic that even beauty such as hers should be so dependent on the sexual humours of this man or that man for its adequate appreciation.

Thought is a real thing. It is a live thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living offspring. Like certain forms of physical pain thoughts can take organic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independently of the person in whose being they originated.

To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.