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

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.