Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

Iron necessity is a thing which in the course of history men come to see as neither iron nor necessary.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.

Like the creatures of the forest and the sea, I love To lose myself for a while.

Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.