The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?

When I ask for a water cress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.