The piano is the social instrument par excellence. . . . drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment."

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form -- or else it is not art.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.