On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.

Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.

India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food.