Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected – in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?
Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.