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I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

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The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mo...more

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Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

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Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love ...more

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Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be g...more

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I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it...more

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Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think th...more

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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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To become a work of art is the object of living.

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It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artist...more

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Cold were the lips, yet he kissed them. Salt was the honey of the hair, yet he tasted it with a bitter joy. He kissed the closed eyelids, and the wild...more

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I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

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Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.

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Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Anc...more

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The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.