I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.