A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.