I'm singing from my heart now more than ever. I've gotten a lot braver with my writing.
The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
The majority of men. . . are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and. . . are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. . . . I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.
Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it - even if we so desired.
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.