The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.