If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

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.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.