It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

A virtuous abstinence from the joys of pederasty comes most easily to those who have no taste for it.