All happiness is a form of innocence.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.