Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

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

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.