The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.  What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know about.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman - or the want of it in the man

To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.