Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

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

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.