The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic.
The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.
Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.
The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Who, being loved, is poor?
Hatred is blind, as well as love.
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.
He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.