Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late

What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?