As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

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

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.