I distrust Great Men... I believe in aristocracy, though... Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet... They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.
A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.
There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
The strong are so stupid.
It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.
In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.
Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.
[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.
We may divide characters into flat and round.
Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.
Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.
Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.
For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.
How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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