Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there was no pleasure in taking a husband who never sees anything.

Morality like art means a drawing a line someplace.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history but they are usurping the domain of fancy and have invaded the kingdom of romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.

Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.