- Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

- Conscience makes egoists of us all.

- We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

- Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disapponited.

- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

- Everything is dangerous. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.

- Realistic painters paint only what the society sees, and the public never sees anything.

- The moral is this: All excess, as well as renunciation, brings its own punishment.

- There is no such as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

- To be good is to be in harmony with one's self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.

- A portrait painted with feelings is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter.

- You do anything in the world to gain reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.

- How fascinating all failures are!

- Sin is a thing that writes himself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

- We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

- All art is quite useless.

- Real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins.

- Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.

- Those who are faithful know the only trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

- There is no such thing as good influence. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view... To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thought, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

- The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfecly -- that is what each of us is here for.

- People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owns to one's self.

- The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.