As you say, I am honoured and famous and rich. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous and poor, as I used to be.

You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.

He who bears the brand of Cain shall rule the earth.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.

You will think less of the art, when you know the artist

A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line