I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.