“Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all the other qualities. It is the nec plus ultra of the intelligence. Through this alone is genius the supreme health and balance of all the faculties.”

“Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness. ”

“The great universal family of men is a utopia worthy of the most mediocre logic.”

“Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all the other qualities. It is the nec plus ultra of the intelligence. Through this alone is genius the supreme health and balance of all the faculties.”

“When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.”

“We say sound things when we do not strive to say to say extraordinary ones.”

“The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.”

“The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find that they know all, meet in that same ignorance whence they started. It is a clever ignorance, which knows itself. Those among them who, having emerged from the first ignorance, have been unable to achieve the other & have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, pose as experts. The latter do not disturb people, are no more mistaken in their judgments on everything than others. The masses, the skilled, make up the retinue of a nation. The others, who respect it, are equally respected by it.”

“Love of justice is for most men only the courage to suffer injustice.”

“I find myself nursing keen regret at probably not being able to live long enough to explain properly to you what I do not myself pretend to know. But since it has been proved that by an extraordinary chance I have not yet lost my life since that far-off time when, filled with terror, I began the preceding sentence, I mentally calculate that it will not be useless here to construct the complete avowal of my basic impotence, especially when it is a matter (as at present) of this imposing & inaccessible question. It is, generally speaking, a singular thing that the attractive tendency which induces us to seek out (in order to then express them) the resemblances & differences concealed in the natural properties of the most conflicting objects, & on the surface sometimes the least apt to lend themselves to this kind of sympathetically curious combination, which -upon my word -gracefully add to the style of the writer, who for personal satisfaction requites himself with the impossible & unforgettable appearance of an owl grave until eternity.”

“To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare.”