The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.
I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.
Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?
Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.
He made me see what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.
How long could you love a woman who didn’t love you, Cecil? A woman who didn’t love me? Oh, all my life!
And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand.
I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice.
You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
Before Turner there was no fog in London.
He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.
The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.
I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.