I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

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 essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.

It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.