Quotes

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

There is no such thing as a good influence. Because 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 virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing 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.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.