The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living.
He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven.
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.
Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.
The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in man That wastes and withers there.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.
I don’t want to earn a living. I want to live.
I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.
If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...
What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.
The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.