Nothing is so
aggravating
as calmness.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision
and inversity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are
preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of so much
importance.
The work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to
dominate the work of art.
One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life. The
less said about life's sores the better.
You can't make people good by act of Parliament--that is something.
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes
on to other things. Nature, on the other hand, forgetting that imitation
can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating the effect
until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things
against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to
him non-existent.
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who
would tell one that would tell one anything.
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively
brutal about the good temper of most modern men. I wonder we women stand
it as well as we do.
The truth is a thing I get rid of as soon as possible. Bad habit, by the
way, makes one very unpopular at the club . . . with the older members.
They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is.
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue--that is the worst of
women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they
meet us they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite
irretrievably bad and to leave us quite unattractively good.
