Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.
Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope.
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.
A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
Nowadays, saying what you really think can be a serious error since one risks being misunderstood.
They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they’re better.
Love! What is love? It’s nothing. It’s just a word. It doesn’t exist. Only pleasure is important.
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.