No More Learning

The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to
look forward to.

Just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the
art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call
nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his
own personality that the critic can interpret the personality of others;
and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation
the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more
convincing, and the more true.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask,
and he will tell you the truth.

All women become like their mothers: that is their tragedy. No man does:
that is his.

Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every woman is a rebel, and
usually in wild revolt against herself.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one.

To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of
life.

The state is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is
beautiful.
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of
punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human
nature and not on its growth and development.

Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is
an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under
socialism and individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in
communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.

All art is immoral.

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.