There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!
Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.
Tread Lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow.
My writing has gone to bits – like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.
The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.
Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.
The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love – that’s the reason one should never marry.
Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.