“The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.”
“No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.”
“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
“All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.”
“Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.”
“America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”
“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
“In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.”
“As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.”
“Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.”
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
“It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
“It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.”
“There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.”
“Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.”
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
“Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.”
“Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.”
“An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.”
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.”
“There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.”
“The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.”
“The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.”
“Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.”
“It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.”
“A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.”
“When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.”