No More Learning

You should never try to understand women. Women are pictures, men are
problems. If you want to know what a woman really means--which, by the
way, is always a dangerous thing to do--look at her, don't listen to
her.

Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to
their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds
as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is
no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and
chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped
smile and their fashionable mauve.

Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary
charm in them--sometimes.

To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one
out from so much.
The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there
have been some--have always insisted on living on long after I had
ceased to care for them or they to care for me. They have become stout
and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences.
That awful memory of women! What a fearful thing it is! And what an
utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!

Examinations are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a
gentleman he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman whatever
he knows is bad for him.

Credit is the capital of a younger son, and he can live charmingly on
it.

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.