For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
He whom many fear, has himself many to fear.
O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Audacity augments courage hesitation, fear.
The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles but today it means getting along with people.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?
I place no hope in my strength, nor in my works: but all my confidence is in God my protector, who never abandons those who have put all their hope and thought in him.
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve and bad things are very easy to get.
Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.
Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.
Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
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