nt. Its ideal is love. Its purification is
sacrifice.

In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbour. In
fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively
vulgar and middle class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality,
everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all
the other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go over
like ninepins--one after the other.

All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine
mode.

If you pretend to be good the world takes you very seriously. If you
pretend to be bad it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of
optimism.

It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his
wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when
they're alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks
like a happy married life.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in
tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or
shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are
forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. The world
is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Men know life too early; women know life too late-that is the difference
between men and women.

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and
that is not being talked about.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves
and fibres and slowly built-up cells, in which thought hides itself and
passion has its dreams.

Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex,
multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought
and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies
of the dead.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she
is perfectly satisfied.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's
tragedies.

Public and private life are different things. They have different laws
and move on different lines.

When one is placed in the position of guardian one has to adopt a very
high moral tone on all subjects. It's one's duty to do so.

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married
should know either everything or nothing.

An engagement should come o