There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know good in anything until you have torn the heart out of it by excess.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise [in the future. But only if we set out to make this true and anticipate it so we look for the blessings until we find them].

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art