Great Throughts Treasury

"Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity."

"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."

"Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude. "

"Biography lends to death a new terror. "

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid."

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same "

"Chastity is the greatest form of perversion. "

"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. "

"But what is the difference between literature and journalism... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all. "

"Clergymen and peopled who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation."

"Conscience and cowardice is really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. "

"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. "

"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to."

"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

"Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile."

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. "

"Dreamers can find their way by moonlight and their only punishment is that they see the dawn before the rest of the world. "

"Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. "

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. "

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. "

"Genius is an infinite capacity for giving pains."

"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. "

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. "

"Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art."

"I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones. "

"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."

"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly. "

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

"I can resist anything except temptation. "

"I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing."

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there. "

"I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. "

"I forget that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, therefore what one does in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops."

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. "

"I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

"I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means. "

"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability. "

"I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything."

"I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the color of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

"If God really wanted to punish, he'd answer all our prayers."

"If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want."

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. "

"If you wish to understand others, you must intensify your own individualism."

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. "

"Imagination is a quality given to man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humaor is provided to console him from what he is. "

"In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."

"Insincerity is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities."