There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.