The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.
I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.
They’ve promised that dreams can come true – but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
All art is quite useless.
The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Everything popular is wrong.
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart – hearts are made to be broken – but that it turns one’s heart to stone.
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.