Love will fly if held too lightly Love will die if held too tightly . . .

Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.