The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on...

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that...

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.

Bad artists always admire each others work.

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, ‘You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar....

If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of...

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I...

So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the...

A fi bun inseamna a fi in armonie cu tine insuti. Disonanta inseamna a fi in armonie cu altii

[W]as verabscheuenswerter sei, die Zeichen der Sünde oder die des Alter.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Contudo, o mais corajoso dentre nós tem medo de si mesmo. A mutilação do selvagem tem a sua trágica sobrevivência na própria renúncia que corrompe as nossas vidas. Somos todos castigados por nossas renúncias. Cada...

It is very wrong to kill any one[.]””Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

[D]as man die wahre Natur der Sinne nie verstanden hatte und dass sie wild und tierisch geblieben waren, nur weil die Welt versucht hatte, sie durch Aushungern zu bändigen und durch schmerzhaften Verzicht abzutöten, statt...

it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the...

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

He wants to enslave you.”I shudder at the thought of being free.

L’inferno e il paradiso sono tutti e due dentro di noi.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Silently we went round and round,And through each hollow mindThe memory of dreadful thingsRushed like a dreadful wind,And horror stalked before each man,And terror crept behind.

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be...

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.

The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.