- I never approve or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
- The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. Unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.
- The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid of ourselves. The basis of optimism is terror.
- If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.
- Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about.
- A cigarette is the perfect type of pleasure. It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied.
- Love is a more wonderful thing than Art.
- One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
- Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.
- The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
- Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
- We live in an age that reads to much to be wise, and thinks to much to be beautiful.
- Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but preparation.
- Those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.
- No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.
- Art, like Nature has her monsters, things of bestial in shape and with hideous voices.
- For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character if a romantic play with the wit and beauty that makes such plays delightful to us.
- Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
- Man was a being with a myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
- There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
- When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
- Nowadays all married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors like married men.
- A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
- I like men with a future and women who have a past.
- Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
- Ugliness was the one reality.
- He was prisoned in thought. Memory like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.
- Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
- A burnt child loves the fire.
- Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood.
- In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That is all.
- As for omens, there is no such things as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
- Knowledge would be fatal. It is uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
- Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
- All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is a crime.
- If a man treats his life artistically, his brain is his heart.
- Art had a soul, but that man had not.
- The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of Romance.
- To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early or act respectable.
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