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

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?

The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

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.

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.

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.