I find it awfully difficult to determine if the habit of talking about oneself at length runs contrary to the basic rules of propriety, or if instead the man exempt from this vice is rare.

The world laughs at things it would really prefer to admire, and like Aesop's fox it criticizes things it covets.

There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.

Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.

The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.