Love, whose power youth feels, is not suitable for the elderly, just as little as anything that presupposes productivity. It is rare that productivity lasts through the years.

There is repetition everywhere, and nothing is found only once in the world.

Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like.

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.

A vi'let on the meadow grew, That no one saw, that no one knew, It was a modest flower. A shepherdess pass'd by that way-- Light footed, pretty and so gay; That way she came, Softly warbling forth her lay.