So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.
People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.
If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.
I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don’t desire.
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.
There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.
All our lives we are putting pennies – our most golden pennies – into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.
How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom.
When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.
To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.
There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.
A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.
Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out.
There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.