A really grand passion is comparatively rare nowadays. It is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes in a country.
There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them; I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it; nothing survives being thought of.
What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art it is one's last mood.
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey, windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
There are two ways of disliking art One is to dislike it and the other to like it rationally.
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be mere visionaries.
I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the marked price of any single thing.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Self-culture is the true ideal for man.
There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
There are things that are right to say but that may be said at the wrong time and to the wrong people.
The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.
The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists and great and individual men.
In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
The development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal the intellectual standard is instantly lowered and often ultimately lost.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has become so rare in modern life.
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.
In married life three is company and two is none.
Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not.
Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
The highest criticism really is the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals, not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life, not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
Man – poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man – belongs to a sex that has been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself; it is in his race. The history of women is very different. They have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common-sense; they saw its dangers from the first.
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common-sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being.
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner-parties.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind.
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediæval days.
Youth! There is nothing like it. It is absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are persons much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The old are in life's lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile – like most kings.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It instinctively feels that manners are of more importance than morals, and in its opinion the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner or poor wine is irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.
While, in the opinion of society, contemplation is the gravest thing of which any citizen can