Your heart and your mouth wil be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.
I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination.
If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.
If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.
The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.
A great social reformer.
A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary.
If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt.
The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.
Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.
Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.
Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.
I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. That is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.
That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it’s horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.
Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.
The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.
The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.
I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.