Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

A mutual misunderstanding.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.