... everyone's free to embark on either a great clipper or a little fishing boat. An artist is an explorer who oughtn't to shrink from anything: it doesn't matter whether he goes to the left or the right -- his goal sanctifies all.

... love is too delicate a flower to rise again when one has trampled it under foot.

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.