Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

A live unexamined isn't worth living. I will add, "A life unlived isn't worth examining.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

Some things are too important to be taken seriously.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.