We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only one excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely...
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him...
The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer...
...an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once, said everything he had to say before he was thirty...
He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time...
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed...
Soul and body, body and soul - how misterious they were! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought?The separation of spirit from matter was a mistery, and the unoin of spirit with matter was a mistery also...
Woman defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders...
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them...
The longer I live, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, in politics, les grandperes ont toujours tort...
Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window...
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy...
There is a luxury in self-reaproch. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution...
When a woman merries again it is because she detested her first husband; when man merries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Woman try their luck; men risk theirs...
Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast...
- Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our country what she is.
-You don't like your country, then?
- I live in it
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He split into a plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries, and through a perforated shell-shaped spoon snowed white sugar upon them.
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.