We do not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and let us outshine our neighbors. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.

Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.

One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.

There is a self-evident axiom, that she who is born a beauty is half married.

I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age--the only perfectly beautiful things on earth--joyous, innocent, half divine--useless, say they who are wiser than God.

In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth.