The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

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.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.