Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.

I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.