To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.