I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.

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

Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.

There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.