A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
A process which makes one rogue cleverer than another.
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten.
A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.
Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne.
Wisdom is to have dreams big enough not to lose sight when we pursue them.
Schools should be the most beautiful place in every town and village-so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be barred from going to school the following day.
A grapefruit is just a lemon that saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.
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.