If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.