I wouldn't marry a man with a future before him for anything under the sun.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly, but I don't see any chance of it just at present.
Modern memoirs are generally written by people who have entirely lost their memories and have never done anything worth recording.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Women are like minors, they live upon their expectations.
Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies.
It is the very passions about whose origin we deceive ourselves that tyrannise most strongly over us. Our weakest motives are those of whose nature we are conscious. It often happens that when we think we are experimenting on others we are really experimenting on ourselves.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motives.
I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me. Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old, and it spoils one's career at critical moments.
I don't play accurately--anyone can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned sentiment is my forte. I keep science for life.
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching--that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
From the point of view of form the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling the actor's craft is the type.
Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals--in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like.
The more we study art the less we care for Nature. What art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.... It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination or fancy or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.