sympathy in an artist is an
unpardonable mannerism of style.

She looks like an 'edition de luxe' of a wicked French novel meant
specially for the English market.

I never knew what terror was before; I know it now. It is as if a hand
of ice were laid upon one's heart. It is as if one's heart were beating
itself to death in some empty hollow.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not
admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be
proved.

One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country
gentleman galloping along after a fox--the unspeakable in pursuit of the
uneatable.

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose
our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues
with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they are! There is
animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The
senses can refine and the intellect can degrade. Who can say where the
fleshly impulse ceases or the psychical impulse begins? How shallow are
the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how
difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the
soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the
soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is
a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is a mystery also.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written-that is all.

Marriage is a sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit,
and sometimes strange renunciations.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,
but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect
medium.

A sense of duty is like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues
of the mind, as certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The
catechism has a great deal to answer for.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.

Few people have sufficient strength to resist the