Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.

Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

I drink to make other people interesting.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

The best Governments of the World have bin composed of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.

The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

Wherever magistrates were appointed from among those who complied with the injunctions of the laws, Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

The aristocracy of Western Europe has absolutely tabooed silver in those countries and driven it away from there. Here it finds its only resting place.

A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy.

The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.