“To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.”

“Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.”

“It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

“Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.”

“To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.”

“Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.”