So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.