There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.