Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

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

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.