There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.

It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.

An opinion is not necesarily correct just because you're willing to die for it.

Millionaire models are rare enough; but model millionaires are rarer still!

I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.