When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself - a rare type in our time ... you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But Oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is!

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you.