To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.
doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.