Emma’s Reviews > Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast > Status Update

“Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction such a fascination?”

“The books that world calls immoral books are the books that show the world its own shame.”

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation...”

“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” (On absinthe)

“But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friends always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.”

“It would be a very good thing if people were taught how to speak. Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself a sort of spiritualised action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.”