“By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high.”

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 17, p. 64

New York Times, April 28, 1985; as quoted in A Speaker's Treasury of Quotations by Michael C. Thomsett and Linda Rose Thomsett (McFarland, 2009), p. 111 https://books.google.it/books?id=igYyBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA111.

Selbst in den äusserlichen Gebräuchen sollte sich die Lebensart der Künstler von der Lebensart der übrigen Menschen durchaus unterscheiden. Sie sind Braminen, eine höhere Kaste, aber nicht durch Geburt sondern durch freye Selbsteinweihung geadelt.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) # 146
Variant translation: Even in their outward behavior, the lives of artists should differ completely from the lives of other men. They are Brahmins, a higher caste: ennobled not by birth, but by free self-consecration.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 146

She’d stopped to massage her hip, wincing. “It simply makes one cross.”
Nooncoming, p. 100 (Originally published in Universe 8, edited by Terry Carr), 1978
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Part 2, Ch. 4.
Household Papers and Stories (1864)

"Mycerinus" (1849)