I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.

The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.