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There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,”
“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”
The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality
We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
“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 virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one 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 for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties,
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”
“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”
As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”
“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,”
often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.
Society—civilized society, at least—is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.
“Each of us has heaven and hell in him,
