Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.

Wisdom comes from disillusionment.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

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

Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.