Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want...

We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope...

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

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the...

Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle...

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it...

Don’t be led astray into the paths of virtue.

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.

Yet each man kills the thing he lovesBy each let this be heardSome do it with a bitter lookSome with a flattering wordThe coward does it with a kissThe brave man with a sword

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be...

The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There...

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher...

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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 virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there...

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who...