Don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens?

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

Of all the animals, man is the only one that lies.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.