We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best.