The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

Life is too short to be taken seriously.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

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.

Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne