The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

People expect too much of one year and too little of ten.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.