fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are
perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.

Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.

In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is
that whose contradictory is also true.

One's days are too brief to take the burden of another's sorrows on
one's shoulders. Each man lives his own life, and pays his own price for
living it. The only pity is that one has to pay so often for a single
fault. One has to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with
man Destiny never closes her accounts.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we
are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow
people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity I call either
the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a
microscope.

Of Shakespeare it may be said that he was the first to see the dramatic
value of doublets and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.

Plain women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful women never
are! They never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous
of other people's husbands.

What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime and the
duties exacted from one after one's death land has ceased to be either a
profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from
keeping it up.

A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is
invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a
woman as a nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I am glad
to say.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier
than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even
glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing
a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is
charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious
by morality.

All beautiful things belong to the same age.

It is personalities, not princ