Men as a rule love with their eyes, women with their ears.
Life is like a box of terrible analogies...
There is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage: a marriage in which there is love, but on one side only.
Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
What the hell is an oboe?
People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Don’t be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.
Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious...
Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.
Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
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.