I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.