Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.
Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
