But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
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.