Genius is an intellect that has become unfaithful to its destiny.

Each day is a little life.

To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.

Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.

Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.

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.

Life is a constant process of dying.