It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.

The test of happiness is gratitude.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.

It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.