If you find one false excuse for yourself, you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before.The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself.The supreme vice is shallowness.an artist, and especially such an artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitudeNothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.