A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring,...

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

I drink to make other people interesting.

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.

It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn’t understand, he wants to know if she’s tired.

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.

I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don’t know one who wouldn’t fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave...

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

A man’s wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.