“Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.”
“The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.”
“By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful.”
“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.”
“The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.”
“Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.”
“It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.”
“The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.”
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
“Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.”
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
“Men always want to be a woman's first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man's last romance.”
“Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable.”
“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”
“In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”
“Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.”
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
“The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.”
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
“Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.”
“Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.”
“I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.”
“Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.”
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
“In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.”
“My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.”
“There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.”
“Like two doomed ships that pass in storm we had crossed each other's way: but we made no sign, we said no word, we had no word to say.”
“And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, none knew so well as I: for he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.”