The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.