“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

“The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.”

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

“I believe that you are really a very good husband but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”

“A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand”