Art is a delayed echo.

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

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

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.