What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?