For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Like evil, sublimity is also contagious.

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.