Menu
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due – she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.