No More Learning

Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has
given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious
except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing and never has been.
It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious
form of intellect I know is the British intellect, and on the British
intellect the illiterate always plays the drum.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either
charming or tedious.

It is only the modern that ever become old-fashioned.

It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the
vulgar test of production.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be
perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely
deaf.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow
old-fashioned quite suddenly.

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The
domestic virtues are not the true basis of art.
To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just
as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so
completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

The only horrible thing in the world is 'ennui. ' That is the one sin for
which there is no forgiveness.

French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that
they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh,
which is worse.

It has often been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of
letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
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.