The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for artists.
The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.
The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither – these make the finest company in the world.
We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.
An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought – only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.
The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.
Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.
I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.
Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.
All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them.