The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

The more a man lives, the more a man creates, the more a man loves and loses those whom he loves, the more does he escape from death. With every new blow that we have to bear, with every new work that we round and finish, we escape from ourselves, we escape into the work we have created, the soul we have loved, the soul that has left us.

Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little truth and many lies.

Love of my country does not demand that I shall hate and slay those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs.

Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.

As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all.