Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.
Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.
I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.
Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them.
More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read.
Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.
Music is the perfect type of art.
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.
It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.
Art, like Nature, has her monsters.
Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.
We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype.