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.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

A virtuous abstinence from the joys of pederasty comes most easily to those who have no taste for it.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.