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The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
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Those whom the gods love grow young.
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The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don't.
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It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.
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If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
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The best revenge is to live well.
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I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.
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It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
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I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
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The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.
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Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
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The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
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Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
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When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
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Some things are more precious because they don't last long.
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I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
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Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
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You never mean a single word you say.
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People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
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Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.
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We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.
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Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
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Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.
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Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.