Max Beerbohm

“ Stark brain is nothing, save in that it contains in itself these twin germs: the Will to Imagine, the Will to Deny; germs that the sages have never developed, never divined; undeveloped and undivined beginnings of two disparate yet parallel powers, anabolic and catabolic, diathennatous, wholly physical, a part of the brute in us. ”

“ Infinity, measurable only by the gauge of Infinity, is itself a speck, imperceptible; so that this my book, published in London, is on sale not only in the meanest stars, orbits, meteorites, moons, and suns of the most remote and recondite systems, but also throughout all the spaces interplanetary and interstellar, nebular or incandescent. More than this. Eternity, measurable only by the gauge of Eternity, is itself a moment, indivisible by time. ”

“ The human brain, at its best has one thousand and sixty-five convolutions. Have it then that Darwin, Descartes, Anaxagoras, could have mustered between them three thousand one hundred and ninety-five such convolutions. Now, in one speck of ether, invisible and imponderable, are trillions on unnumbered trillions of interplications, sedimentary excretions and incretions, abrasions, indentations obsessive and excessive, bumps, twists, querks, irrosions, and perispheric apodomies. ”