The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one.

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

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 don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.