By the time a philospher answers a question weve usually forgotten what was asked.
Prejudices are the props of civilization.
Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.
Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.
There is a law in life: When one door closes to us another one opens.
Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good.”
The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.
Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?
An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.
When everything belongs to everyone, nobody will take care of anything.
Our deeds attach themselves to us like the flame to phosphorus. They constitute our brilliance, to be sure, but only in so far as they consume us.
It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.
The great artist is one whom constraint exalts, for whom the obstacle is a springboard.
Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.
Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.