There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.

The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.

There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.