A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.

The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.