Women, as some witty Frenchman put it, inspire us with the desire to do
masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
The only way to behave to a woman, is to make love to her if she is
pretty and to someone else if she is plain.
Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they
invariably want it back in such very small change.
Define women as a sex? Sphinxes without secrets.
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.
What do you call a bad woman? Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets
tired of.
One can resist everything except temptation.
Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a
thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and
without that fine correspondence or form and spirit which is the only
thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
One can always know at once whether a man has home claims upon his life
or not. I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so
many married men.
A mother who doesn't part with a daughter every season has no real
affection.
To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to
be in harmony with others.
A really grand passion is comparatively rare nowadays. It is the
privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the
idle classes in a country.
There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be
always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them; I
sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is
quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of
anything you kill it; nothing survives being thought of.
What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has
survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters
of art it is one's last mood.
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is
absolutely fatal.
Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for
pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its
train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the
purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and
things less noble take its place, and on some grey, windy dawn, or
odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with
callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked
hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
There are two ways of disliking art One is to dislike it and the other
to like it rationally.
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to
be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
seem to the world to be mere visionaries.
I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world.
Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such
extraordinary importance.
A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and
doesn't know the marked price of any single thing.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Self-culture is the true ideal for man.
There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's
a thing no married man knows anything about.
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of
dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got
a memory or not.
There are things that are right to say but that may be said at the wrong
time and to the wrong people.
The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the
soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay,
it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad
meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new
relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and
a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we
fear that we may receive.
The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem,
and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to
develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and
individual artists and great and individual men.
In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so
dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by
deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
The development of the race depends on the development of the
individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal the
intellectual standard is instantly lowered and often ultimately lost.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at
all.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has
become so rare in modern life.
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right
also.
The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with
Revelations.
In married life three is company and two is none.
Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in
the creator was not.
Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one
knows that life has exhausted him.
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.
The highest criticism really is the record of one's own soul. It is more
fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is
more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not
abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of
autobiography, as it deals, not with the events, but with the thoughts
of one's life, not with life's physical accidents of deed or
circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of
the mind.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored
you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of
possessing the most perfect social tact.
Man--poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man--belongs to a sex that has
been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself;
it is in his race. The history of women is very different. They have
always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of
common-sense; they saw its dangers from the first.
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common-sense of the husband
than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a
man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational
being.
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like
stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner-parties.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work
when there is no definite object of any kind.
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most
difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for
wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form
of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the
saint and the mystic of mediæval days.
Youth! There is nothing like it. It is absurd to talk of the ignorance
of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any
respect are persons much younger than myself. They seem in front of me.
Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an
art.