You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

If I hadn't believed it, then I wouldn't have seen it

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

The worst thing to do with success, is to boast about it.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.