- "It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." (2)
- "But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face..." (3)
- "There is fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at heir ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of the victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat." (3)
- "But 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." (8-9)
- "It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all have a struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill out minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place." (12)
- "What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic." (12)
- "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some ones else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here or. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self." (17)
- "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." (20
- "When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no more triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of our past will make more bitter than defeats...Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These re sickly aims, the false ideals of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing." (22)
- "...had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing." (31)
- "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic." (35)
- "The advantage of the emotion is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that is is not emotional." (40)
- "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It's the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different. (41)
- "'Yes,' he continued, 'that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a story of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.'" (41)
- "'All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.'" (43)
- "You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do." (48)
- "It as true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear one's face a mask of glass, not keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one has to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one!"
may 30 2012 ∞
aug 6 2012 +
aug 6 2012 +