No More Learning

The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there,
there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see
the pictures--which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not
been able to see the people--which was worse.

All art is quite useless.

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony
of any face. The moment one sits down to think one becomes all nose or
all forehead or something horrid.

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception
absolutely necessary for both parties.

Secrecy seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious
or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides
it.

Conceit is one of the greatest of the virtues, yet how few people
recognise it as a thing to aim at and to strive after. In conceit many a
man and woman has found salvation, yet the average person goes on
all-fours grovelling after modesty.

It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.

Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins not to
a friend but to the world.

Just as those who do not love Plato more than truth cannot pass beyond
the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love beauty more than
truth never know the inmost shrine of art.

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction: the
sort of fatality that seems to dog, through history, the faltering steps
of kings.
It is better not to be different from one's fellows.

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or
not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of
family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French
Revolution.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

There must be a new Hedonism that shall recreate life and save it from
that harsh, uncomely Puritanism that is having, in our own day, its
curious revival. It must have its service of the intellect, certainly,
yet it must never accept any theory or system that will involve the
sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, is to
be experience itself and not the fruits of experience, bitter or sweet
as they may be. Of the aestheticism that deadens the senses, as of the
vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it is to know nothing. But it is to
teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
itself but a moment.

Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life,
just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not
necessarily realistic in an age of realism nor spiritual in an age of
faith. So far from being the creation of its time it is usually in
direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us
is the history of its own progress.

People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear
clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good
intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the
improbable.