No More Learning

The world divides actions into three classes: good actions, bad actions
that you may do, and bad actions that you may not do. If you stick to
the good actions you are respected by the good. If you stick to the bad
actions that you may do you are respected by the bad. But if you perform
the bad actions that no one may do then the good and the bad set upon
you and you are lost indeed.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their
good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To me the word 'natural' means all that is middle class, all that is of
the essence of Jingoism, all that is colourless and without form and
void. It might be a beautiful word, but it is the most debased coin in
the currency of language.

I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably
never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's
solitude.

It is only when we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have
learned the art of living.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The world taken 'en masse' is a monster, crammed with prejudices, packed
with prepossessions, cankered with what it calls virtues, a Puritan, a
prig. And the art of life is the art of defiance. To defy--that is what
we ought to live for, instead of living, as we do, to acquiesce.
Some resemblance the creative work of the critic will have to the work
that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as
exists, not between nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape
or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between nature and the
work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of
Persia tulip and rose blossom indeed, and are lovely to look on, though
they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the pearl and
purple of the sea shell is echoed in the church of St Mark at Venice;
just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made
gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and
shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of
beauty, and by transforming each art into literature solves once for all
the problem of art's unity.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital.


Nothing is more painful to me than to come across virtue in a person in
whom I have never suspected its existence. It is like finding a needle
in a bundle of hay. It pricks you. If we have virtue we should warn
people of it.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material
his impression of beautiful things.

Hopper is one of nature's gentlemen--the worst type of gentleman I
know.

If one intends to be good one must take it up as a profession. It is
quite the most engrossing one in the world.

I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can
talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Childhood is one long career of innocent eavesdropping, of hearing what
one ought not to hear.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.