There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.
The man who is master of his passions is Reason’s slave.
We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.
The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.
It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.
Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.
The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.