“Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.”

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.

In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed.

You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity.

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.

There is not in nature, a thing that makes man so deformed, so beastly, as doth intemperate anger.