It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

The idealist is incorrigible: if he be thrown out of his Heaven, he makes himself a suitable ideal out of Hell.

The visionary denies the truth to himself, the liar only to others.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.