Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

... 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.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.