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

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.