Beware of long arguments and long beards.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

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.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.