Life holds the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.
I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
I am always saying what I shouldn't say; in fact, I usually say what I really think—a great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.
The basis of every scandal is an absolute immoral certainty.
People talk so much about the beauty of confidence. They seem to entirely ignore the much more subtle beauty of doubt. To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.