No More Learning

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing
of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century one must
realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to
its making.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them.
The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the
world has ever known; the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the
only tyranny that lasts.

The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married.

There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are
imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and
yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain
free at all.

A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence or a
scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions.

All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.

The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will
forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world
unless he has got women to back him--and women rule society. If you have
not got women on your side you are quite over. You might just as well be
a barrister or a stockbroker or a journalist at once.

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existence.
But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been
understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because
the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by
pain instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of
which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic.

Women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They have wonderfully
primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves,
looking for their master all the same. They love being dominated.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It
is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the way of the
gods must be prepared.

Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to
receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on
a coat--that is the only difference.

Criticism is itself an art. .