It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.