Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?