There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

The wise man does not grow old, but ripens.

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.