The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.

An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham.

Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.