Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life. Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling.

Yet here I stand poor fool what more, not one wit wiser than before.

I nothing had, and yet enough for youth--Joy in Illusion, ardent thirst for Truth. Give unrestrained, the old emotion, The bliss that touched the verge of pain, The strength of Hate, Love's deep devotion,--O, give me back my youth again!

Every offense is avenged on earth.

For the nature of women is closely allied to art

It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."

If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.