The only proper intoxication is conversation.
Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age.
I don’t like principles. I prefer prejudices.
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
We women adore failures. They lean on us.
The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.
Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.
Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.
Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.
However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.
I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures.
The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.
America is one long expectoration.
Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.
It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.
Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.
Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.