I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

Life is like a box of terrible analogies.

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .