Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love.
A man may be a great statesman, and yet dislike his wife, and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero, and yet he may have an unseemly passion, or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this. ... It thinks, unhappily or happily as you may choose to consider, that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them.
Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.
The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming pleased than people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices of her enemies by the unaffected delight she appeared to take in themselves.
Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.
Most crimes are sanctioned in some form or other when they take grand names.
Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone
Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.
A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
Dishonor is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.
[On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.
To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.
Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.
Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever? Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?
Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.
Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.
It is only to those who have never lived that death ever can seems beautiful.
What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim widely and weakly?
I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome. ... no one can disgrace you save yourself.
When passion and habit long lie in company it is only slowly and with incredulity that habit awakens to finds its companion fled, itself alone.
Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a snug brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.
There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.
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