My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe…

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent …

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.