Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
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Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.
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It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.
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The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
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Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
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If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.
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The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
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Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?
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The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world
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Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.
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Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, to one's affections, and one's inner happiness.
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Admiration and familiarity are strangers.
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Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.
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Work is not man's punishment! It is his reward and his strength, his glory and his pleasure.
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There is only one happiness in life, to love and to be loved.
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The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.
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One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.
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No religion can be built on force.
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Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.
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