Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.

It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.