Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.
A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?
To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.
Talent borrows, genius steals!
The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.
Now and then it is a joy to have one’s table red with wine and roses.
To be premature is to be perfect.
I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.
Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.
People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.
If people were meant to be nude, they would have been born this way.
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.
Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler.
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.