No More Learning

The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of
the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
its proper value.

Women have no appreciation of good looks in men--at least good women
have none.

To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think
his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are
not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part
that has not been written for him.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the
faithless who know love's tragedies.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his
own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were
meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of
beauty.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got
one who is a fool.
They are all men of some intellectual power, and
consequently they all appreciate me.

The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of
the man who expresses it.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
principles better than anything else in the world.

He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and
absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science;
or a young student at the university, or one who watches sheep upon a
moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God,
like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.

The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature
perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.

There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is
immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view.

Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as
rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the
Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than
that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and
passion and spirituality are theirs also--are theirs, indeed, alone.

There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The
pun is the clown among jokes, the well-turned paradox is the polished
comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the
keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds
are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods
often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is inappropriate.

The longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
it is not the moment that makes the man but the man who creates the age.