The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.

Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.