What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the show fiber has passed into your body.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.

We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.

Nature tells every secret once.