"It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
"Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed."
"One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable."
tags: english, health, humor "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist—that is all."
"Women are made to be loved, not to be understood."
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live: and unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them."
"What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."
"Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope."
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
"Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality."
"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young."
"To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals."
"The public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything except genius. Life"
"Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable mauve."
"Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and rebellion. It"
"The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations. In"
"There are terrible temptations that it requires strength--strength and courage--to yield to. To stake all one's life on one throw--whether the stake be power or pleasure I care not--there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible, courage."
"When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."
"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst—the last is a real tragedy."
"If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him."
"I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love, but there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
"There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."
"Society often forgives the criminal, it never forgives the dreamer."
"Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and rebellion."
"No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever knows what a pleasure is."
"Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one's relations."
"We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent."
"What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us."
"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life fully, entirely, completely, or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."