The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

Every idea must have a visible enfolding.

As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.

When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.