"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."

"No good deed goes unpunished."

"I have nothing to declare except my genius."

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."

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

"What fire does not destroy, it hardens"

"But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."

"A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."

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

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

"Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is."

"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life."

"To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."

"The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."

"Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing."

"I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!"

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