preposterous claims of
orthodoxy.

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes.
That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

A virtue is like a city set upon a hill--it cannot be hid. We can
conceal our vices if we care to--for a time at least--but a virtue will
out.

Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the
dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.

You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure,
unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.

Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless
it be telling the truth.

Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the
fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long,
cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional
utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative
insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature
is the greater art.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far
the best ending for one.

Mrs Cheveley is one of those very modern women of our time who find a
new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the Park
every afternoon at 5.30. I am sure she adores scandals, and that the
sorrow of her life at present is that she can't manage to have enough of
them.

The world divides actions into three classes: good actions, bad actions
that you may do, and bad actions that you may not do. If you stick to
the good actions you are respected by the good. If you stick to the bad
actions that you may do you are respected by the bad. But if you perform
the bad actions that no one may do then the good and the bad set upon
you and you are lost indeed.

I choose m