The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.

Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.

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