Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.
A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism.
Every idea must have a visible enfolding.
Creation lives, grows, and multiplies; man is but a witness.
A woman’s best qualities are harmful if undiluted with prudence.
The world of sleep has an existence of its own.
Is it not a thing divine to have a smile which, none know how, has the power to lighten the weight of that enormous chain which all the living in common drag behind them?
The production of souls is the secret of unfathomable depth.
God put in man thought; society, action; nature, revery.
This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.
The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.
In my old age there is a coming into flower. My body wanes; my mind waxes.
Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.
All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’ there is only one answer and that is ’yes.
Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.
If we must suffer, let us suffer nobly.
Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping.
To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.
I was always a lover of soft-winged things.