Mirrors only reflect masks.
Hula is gossip with an air of boring morality.
Do you know how much curiosity a woman has? It almost surpasses that of men.
The ideal man must speak to women as he does to goddesses and treat them as he does children.
Of all the painters I knew, only the mediocre ones were charming people. The gifted live by their creation and are therefore rather uninteresting in their own way. A great poet - really great - is the most prosaic person. Second hand ones are charming.
It is precisely the passions whose nature we misunderstand that dominate us the most. And the weakest are feelings whose origin is clear to us.
Keeping secrets from other wives is, nowadays, a necessary luxury. But trying to hide something from your own wife is an unforgivable superficiality. She will find out anyway.
Sometimes it is said that the actors show us Hamlet as they see him instead of the one Shakespeare painted. But in fact there is no such thing as Shakespeare's Hamlet. If in Hamlet there is the clarity of a work of art, there is also an amount of mystery in it as in any phenomenon of life. There are as many Hamlets as there are types of melancholy.
Intellectual abstractions are always interesting, but moral abstractions mean absolutely nothing.
Sincerity is dangerous in small doses, and deadly in larger doses.
Art is the only serious thing in the world, and the artist is the only man in the world who is never serious.
Art should by no means be accessible to everyone. The public must tend to the education of the artistic sense.
Art is a cover rather than a mirror.
Art creates great archetypes in relation to which all that exists is but an unfinished copy.
Art creates its incomparable unique effect, after which, having achieved it, it moves on to something else. And nature repeats this effect over and over, until it bores them all to the hilt. Nowadays, let's say, no one endowed with even rudiments of culture will make a speech about the beauty of the sunset. Sunsets have gone out of fashion. They were good in the old days, when Turner had the last word in painting.
I have not become a deranged man. Many even claim that I have never done anything really bad in my entire life. Of course, they only say this behind my back.
Truth never depends on facts, he selects and creates them as he pleases.
Truth ceases to be truth as soon as more than one person believes it.
Truth is wholly and absolutely given by style.
True personality must not be in tune with rebellion, but with tranquility.
True love forgives all crimes except the one against love.
Only characters who never existed in reality are truly real; and if a novelist is so helpless, he looks for his heroes in the midst of his life, at least to pretend to have invented them himself, and not to boast that they resembled certain models.
The history of women is one of the most terrible histories of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. That is the only form of tyranny that still exists.
Everyone must be a work of art or carry a work of art with them.
Everyone should go to a fortune teller at least once a month to know what is allowed and what is not. Then, of course, we turn everything upside down, but how nice to know the consequences in advance!
Anyone can write a three-volume novel. All you need for this is to know neither life nor literature.
Anyone can create history, but only remarkable people are able to write it.
Like most American women, she thinks she is a beautiful woman. This is the secret of his success.
Like all orators who make it their aim to exhaust the subject, he exhausted the patience of his hearers.
How easy it is to win others over to your faith and how difficult it is to win yourself over.