whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.