The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination.

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.

When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.

My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.

Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.