A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.

The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real

The eye of a man should be still more reverent before the rising of a young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch should increase respect. The down of the peach, the dust of the plum, the radiated crystal of snow, the butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are gross things beside that chastity that does not even know it is chaste. The young maiden is only the glimmer of a dream and is not yet statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of the eye desecrates this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze, is to profane.

Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions

...Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.