A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.

The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.