I’d personally like to see the Human Rights Act go because I think we have had some problems with it

I’m sick and tired of government ministers in this Labour government who simply blame other people when things go wrong

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing

What I write is not for little girls

White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments.

It is gentle manners which prove so irresistible in women

It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat

It is a difficult matter to gain the affection of a cat. He is a philosophical, methodical animal, tenacious of his own habits, fond of order and neatness, and disinclined to extravagant sentiment. He will be your friend, if he finds you worthy of friendship, but not your slave

With all women gentleness is the most persuasive and powerful argument

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet

The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn’t exist

Good heavens! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfectibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into our ears

What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love

The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved

Sometimes he sits at your feet looking into your face with an expression so gentle and caressing that the depth of his gaze startles you

Sometimes he will sit on the carpet in front of you, looking at you with eyes so melting, so caressing and so human, that they almost frighten you, for it is impossible to believe that a soul is not there

I am one of those for whom superfluity is a necessity

Books follow morals, and not morals books

Critical lice are like body lice, which desert corpses to seek the living

Sooner barbarity than boredom

Cats are the tigers of us poor devils

Yes I have loved, as no one on earth ever loved, with an insensate and furious love, so violent that I wonder it did not break my heart

Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel

Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage

Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest

I am a man for whom the outside world exists

Modesty was made for the ugly.

The arts teach and moralise by their beauty alone, not by translating a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic person, painting has itself as it’s purpose, which is quite enough

Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist

To extract beauty from one’s own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art

The cat is a dilettante in fur

The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude, melancholy and toilc

Our busy age does not always have time to read, but it always has time to look

High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city.

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution

Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet

Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes!

Fortune loves to give bedroom slippers to people with wooden legs, and gloves to those with no hands

No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved

It may well be that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet and their like contain beauties which escape the notice of such old romantic heads as ours, already streaked with silver threads

Only Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly

Eyes so transparent that through them the soul is seen

There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man’s needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet

When we love – we grow

I was born to travel and write verse

The purity of a person’s heart can be quickly measured by how they regard animals

To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind