It is not the tree that forsakes the flower, but the flower that forsakes the tree.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself.

Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.

Be kind. Aim for my heart.

Ah," said the jailer, "do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight.