Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.