All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.

Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you.

Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.

ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl...I have ever met since...I met you.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.