I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.
Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.
I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.
An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought - only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
If it's to be, it's up to me.
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.
It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.
Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out.
The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.
So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.
When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.
We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.
Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.
Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.
But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.
The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.
I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.
I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.
Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.
You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate
How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom
What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.
The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!
One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.
What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.
The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best.
When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!
The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.
There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.
Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.
Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth
Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.
Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.
The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.
But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.
All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.
Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out.
The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.
We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave
I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.
Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.
All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them.
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.
All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.
A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.
This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.
The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.
Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.
Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.
