The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.