The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

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.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.

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