Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.