Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.
I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.
There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.
Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.
A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.