All our affirmations are mere matters of chronology; and even our bad taste is nothing more than the bad taste of the age we live in.

If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.

Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.

The vitality of a new movement in art or letters can be pretty accurately gauged by the fury it arouses.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them.

Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.