If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience. Sand and Foam

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it. Mark Twain's Notebook

Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal. Nicholas Nickleby

“He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it;spellbound by vice and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a stranger, like an alien from another planet, he had taken no part in the common life of men, and had been indifferent to their sufferings, their ideas, their religion, their sciences, their strivings, and their struggles. He had not said one good word, not written one line that was not useless and vulgar; he had not done his fellows one ha'p'orth of service, but had eaten their bread, drunk their wine, seduced their wives, lived on their thoughts, and to justify his contemptible, parasitic life in their eyes and his own, he had always tried to assume an air of being higher and better than they. Lies, lies...” The Duel