No More Learning

Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the
dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.

You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure,
unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.

Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless
it be telling the truth.

Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the
fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long,
cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional
utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative
insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature
is the greater art.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far
the best ending for one.

Mrs Cheveley is one of those very modern women of our time who find a
new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the Park
every afternoon at 5. 30. I am sure she adores scandals, and that the
sorrow of her life at present is that she can't manage to have enough of
them.

The world divides actions into three classes: good actions, bad actions
that you may do, and bad actions that you may not do. If you stick to
the good actions you are respected by the good.
If you stick to the bad
actions that you may do you are respected by the bad. But if you perform
the bad actions that no one may do then the good and the bad set upon
you and you are lost indeed.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their
good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To me the word 'natural' means all that is middle class, all that is of
the essence of Jingoism, all that is colourless and without form and
void. It might be a beautiful word, but it is the most debased coin in
the currency of language.

I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably
never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's
solitude.

It is only when we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have
learned the art of living.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The world taken 'en masse' is a monster, crammed with prejudices, packed
with prepossessions, cankered with what it calls virtues, a Puritan, a
prig. And the art of life is the art of defiance. To defy--that is what
we ought to live for, instead of living, as we do, to acquiesce.

Some resemblance the creative work of the critic will have to the work
that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as
exists, not between nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape
or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between nature and the
work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of
Persia tulip and rose blossom indeed, and are lovely to look on, though
they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the pearl and
purple of the sea shell is echoed in the church of St Mark at Venice;
just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made
gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and
shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of
beauty, and by transforming each art into literature solves once for all
the problem of art's unity.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital.