There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.

A kiss may ruin a human life

American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.

She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.

The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.