In married life three is company and two is none.
It is strange,’ the bird said. ‘It is very cold, but I feel quite warm.’
‘That is because you have done a good thing,’ said the prince.
Life at times loses its sense of reality; it appears to us like a weird, optical illusion – a phantasmagoric bubble that will disappear at the slightest breath.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
Form is everything. It is the secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.
Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trails are often blessings in disguise.
If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.
Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.
The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one’s own perfection, to make one’s every dream a reality.
All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time.
At the beginning I believe that God made a world for each separate man, and within that world, which is within us, one should seek to live
