No More Learning

No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who
can't succeed in obtaining that worst and most necessary of evils, a
husband.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know
when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon
as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue
it. If they were allowed their way every comedy would have a tragic
ending and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly
artificial, but they have no sense of art.

Each time that one loves is the only time that one has ever loved.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely
intensifies it.

The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but
self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of
the rich.

Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is
nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its
curious crucible of pain and pleasure one cannot wear over one's face a
mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and
making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen
dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one
has to sicken of them.
There are maladies so strange that one has to
pass through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what
a great reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to
one! To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional,
coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they meet, and where
they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they
are in discord--there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost
is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money
than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
That is the misery of being poor.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist--that is
all.

Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated
by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break
the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad without ever doing anything bad.