The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
America is a young country with an old mentality.