If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

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.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.