The spirit is often most free when the body is satiated with pleasure; indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from the hilltop.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be so grossly over-populated as it is now.

The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

There's no one so transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.

I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his own thoughts.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.