Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

I remember my youth... the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.

You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy