If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.