A man who pays his bills on time is soon forgotten.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

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.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.