Emotions and Feelings

The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself.

Enthusiasm is a volcano on whose top never grows the grass of hesitation.

Enthusiasm is a volcano on whose top never grows the grass of hesitation.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

The passions that motivate you may change, but it is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

For most of my reading I go back to the old ones – for comfort.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and at times—and this is the worst of all—before we have new ones.

There is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather.

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

All of one’s contemporaries and aging friends are living in a delicate balance, and one feels that one’s own consciousness is no longer as brightly lit as it once was. But then, twilight with its more subdued colors has its charms as well.

I never saw a man who looked

I never saw a man who looked

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

Why don’t you come up sometime, and see me?

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.