But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone.

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

A holy spirit lives within you.

Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.

Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling.

... in marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.