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

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.