Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.
What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.
Art persists, it timelessly continues.
The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them...
I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap’s bills and don’t bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
In married life three is company and two none.
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.