Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored.

Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.