The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Daughter of Sodom, come not near me! But cover thy face with a veil, and scatter ashes upon thine head, and get thee to the desert and seek out the Son of Man.
Art begins with abstract decoration with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non existent.
The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.
I wish I could love,” cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in his voice. “But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality has become a burden to me.
Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.
Le donne ci ispirano il desiderio di far dei capolavori e ci impediscono sempre di eseguirli.
No one survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying an author’s reputation than to glorify him without judgement and to praise him without tact.
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
Her hair clustered around her face like dark leaves round a pale rose.
I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at him and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won’t like his tone of color, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic.
I have grown to love secrecy.
He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind mechanical forces of Society, and who does not recognise the dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.
I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes – to wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them...
If you wish me to never look at your picture again, I am content. I have always you to look at. If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden from the world, I am satisfied. Your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation.
People never think of cultivating a young girl’s imagination. It is the great defect of modern education.
Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. As for the aged, I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in 1820, when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew absolutely nothing.