To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.

Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art.

The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.

I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.

When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.

Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.