Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Charity creates a multitude of sins.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Hatred is blind, as well as love.
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
I can resist everything except temptation.
I am not young enough to know everything.
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
There is no sin except stupidity.
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
These days man knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
True friends stab you in the front.
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
Women are made to be loved, not understood.