We make gods of men and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful.
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
To me beauty is the Wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Women have no appreciation of good looks in men—at least good women have none.
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.