I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

To be simple is the best thing in the world.

The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation, and admired for the wrong reasons.

Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.