This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!

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

...If I continued to harbour any hope for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it.

Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book -I call that vicious!

A noble soul is not the one that can manage the highest flights but the one that rises very little and falls very little but always dwells in a free, resplendent atmosphere and altitude.

Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.