An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.