In misfortune we usually regain the peace that we were robbed of through fear of that very misfortune.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death... I think... peace and tranquillity will return again.
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
Be the first to say something obvious and achieve immortality.
Intelligence is a moral category.
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream not only plan, but also believe.
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.
Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
No emancipation without that of society.
If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
The artist can wish for nothing better than blunt friends and polite enemies.
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