No More Learning

The object of art is not simply truth but complex beauty. Art itself is
really a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.

The popular cry of our time is: 'Let us return to Life and Nature, they
will recreate Art for us and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong. '
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meant efforts. Nature
is always behind the age. And as for life, she is the solvent that
breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.

There are only two kinds of women--the plain and the coloured. The plain
women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for
respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other
women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however--they paint in
order to try and look young.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it
on the tight-rope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. . . . The Greeks with
their quick, artistic instinct understood this, and set in the bride's
chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children
as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her
pain. They knew that life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth
of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can
form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the
dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came this
objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They
felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly
right.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of
the intellect--simply a confession of failure.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid
that others might pick them up.

What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a
question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young
men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and
cannot--that is all one can say.

Modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong.