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To be in society is merely a bore, but to be out of it simply a tragedy.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
One should never make one's début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
Society often forgives the criminal, it never forgives the dreamer.
It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
Conversation should touch on everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything and people who know absolutely nothing.
The public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything except genius.
Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
This horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing they called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
What is true about art is true about life.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Women, as some witty Frenchman put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
The only way to behave to a woman, is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain.
Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they invariably want it back in such very small change.
Define women as a sex? Sphinxes without secrets.
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.
What do you call a bad woman? Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets tired of.
One can resist everything except temptation.
Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence or form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
One can always know at once whether a man has home claims upon his life or not. I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men.
A mother who doesn't part with a daughter every season has no real affection.
To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
A really grand passion is comparatively rare nowadays. It is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes in a country.
There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them; I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it; nothing survives being thought of.
What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art it is one's last mood.
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey, windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
There are two ways of disliking art One is to dislike it and the other to like it rationally.
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be mere visionaries.
I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the marked price of any single thing.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Self-culture is the true ideal for man.
There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
There are things that are right to say but that may be said at the wrong time and to the wrong people.
The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.
The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists and great and individual men.
In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
The development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal the intellectual standard is instantly lowered and often ultimately lost.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has become so rare in modern life.
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.
The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.
In married life three is company and two is none.
Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not.
Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
The highest criticism really is the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals, not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life, not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
Man – poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man – belongs to a sex that has been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself; it is in his race. The history of women is very different. They have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common-sense; they saw its dangers from the first.
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common-sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being.
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner-parties.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind.
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediæval days.
Youth! There is nothing like it. It is absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are persons much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The old are in life's lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile – like most kings.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It instinctively feels that manners are of more importance than morals, and in its opinion the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner or poor wine is irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.
While, in the opinion of society, contemplation is the gravest thing of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long or not long enough.
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. It is the symbol of symbols. It reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What they like is to be a man's last romance.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful but the stupid who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
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.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection; through art and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us.
When a woman finds out that her husband is absolutely indifferent to her, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for.
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For when the ideal is realised it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
People who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that their moods are rather meaningless.
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
Good women have such a limited view of life, their horizon is so small, their interests so petty. The fact is they are not modern, and to be modern is the only thing worth being nowadays.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition of what married women's property really is.
I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice. As a man sows so let him reap.
