Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval.
Prism! Where is that baby?
There was purification in punishment. Not ‘Forgive us our sins,’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel.
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.
Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.
Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.
To get back one’s youth one has merely to repeat one’s follies.
If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable.
Well, I don’t like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don’t you go up and change? It’s perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
Love is easily killed.
Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.
Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.
I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.