As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don’t.
To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self.
Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.
Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!
Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame.
Where your life leads you, you must go.
I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.
It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.
Ah, on what little things does happiness depend.
All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all.
He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.
It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.
Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world’s tongue.
One should absorb the color of life.
People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.