Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

(T)here was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn't say what she did about it, but I've always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

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

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.