The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.

It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction...the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

I feel that I am entitled to my share of lightheartedness and there is nothing wrong with enjoying one's self simply, like a boy.