When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.
There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.
Men seek but one thing in life – their pleasure.
It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
The tragedy of love is indifference.
I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.
We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.
Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.
For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.
The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
I cannot believe in a God who has neither humor nor common sense.
Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.
When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.
The end of culture is right living.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.