“I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.”

“To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.”

“You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.”

“What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.”

“In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.”

“There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.”

“Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.”