No More Learning

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is
absolutely fatal.

Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for
pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its
train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the
purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and
things less noble take its place, and on some grey, windy dawn, or
odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with
callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked
hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.

There are two ways of disliking art One is to dislike it and the other
to like it rationally.

There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to
be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
seem to the world to be mere visionaries.

I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world.
Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such
extraordinary importance.

A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and
doesn't know the marked price of any single thing.

Punctuality is the thief of time.

Self-culture is the true ideal for man.

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman.
It's
a thing no married man knows anything about.

No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of
dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got
a memory or not.

There are things that are right to say but that may be said at the wrong
time and to the wrong people.

The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the
soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay,
it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad
meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new
relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and
a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we
fear that we may receive.

The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem,
and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to
develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and
individual artists and great and individual men.

In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so
dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, and one ends by
deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.