The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.

At present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below me, now a god dances through me.

Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.

Christianity has the rancor of the sick at its very core-the instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is well-constructed, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offense to its ears and eyes.

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.