Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.

Scandal: gossip made tedious by morality.

Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

Who, being loved, is poor?

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.