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All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But ... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.