Quotes

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

It is sad. One half of the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do . . . the day after.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

[ Reply when asked, as an Oxford undergraduate, why he was staring raptly at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece :] Oh, would that I could live up tomy blue china!

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

[ Of George Bernard Shaw :] An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.

It is indeed a burning shame that thereshould be one law for men and another law for women. . . . I think that there should be no law for anybody.

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

I know not whether Laws be right,

To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imaginationof my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. . . . The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.

And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.

The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare.

On account of it [“the Love that dare not speak its name”] I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him.

In all things connected with money I have had a luck so extraordinary that sometimes it has made me almost afraid. I remember havingread somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

Life is never fair.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

You can’t make people good by Act of Parliament.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

Ernest Harrowden, one of those middle-agedmediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends.

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

[ Sir Thomas Burdon :] They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris. . . .

How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.