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

The very "marks" on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy.

The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, "Where is the best place to go to?" He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages--heaven for climate, and hell for society.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.

It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong, but no matter, the crowd follows it.