If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.