Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

My duty to myself is to amuse myself terrifically.

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

it would be a very good thing if people were taught how to speak. Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself is a sort of spiritualized action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

To become a work of art is the object of living.

Are there not books that make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

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

We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

by nature and by choice, i am extremely indolent.

The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one’s own perfection, to make one’s every dream a reality.

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

Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

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 through rebellion. In art, as in politics, there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of expression

Things last either too long or not long enough.

My existence is a scandal.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens.

People never think of cultivating a young girl’s imagination. It is the great defect of modern education.

To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display.

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognizance … It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose.