They affect us just as
vulgarity
affects us.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
Modern, no less than
ancient, history supplies us with many most painful examples of what I
refer to. If it were not so, indeed, history would be quite unreadable.
I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity
of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is
never advisable.
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life
he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of
profile.
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women
who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.
Never speak disrespectfully of society. Only people who can't get into
it do that.
It is always painful to part with people whom one has known for a very
brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with
equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has
just been introduced is almost unbearable.
To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his
temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of
reason.
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply
our personalities.
In a temple everyone should be serious except the thing that is
worshipped.
We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom
one has ceased to love.
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in
morals mean absolutely nothing.
To be in society is merely a bore, but to be out of it simply a tragedy.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve
that to give an interest to one's old age.
What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but
simply life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he
can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever,
and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner,
healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is nature's test, her
sign of approval. When man is happy he is in harmony with himself and
his environment.
Society often forgives the criminal, it never forgives the dreamer.
It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so
difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
Conversation should touch on everything, but should concentrate itself
on nothing.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that
no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the
priest, that gives us absolution.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people
who know absolutely everything and people who know absolutely nothing.
The public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything except
genius.
Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the
meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
This horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think
the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that
there has been since that terrible thing they called the Higher
Education of Women was invented.
Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully
effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very
attractive.
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
What is true about art is true about life.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Women, as some witty Frenchman put it, inspire us with the desire to do
masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
The only way to behave to a woman, is to make love to her if she is
pretty and to someone else if she is plain.
Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they
invariably want it back in such very small change.
Define women as a sex? Sphinxes without secrets.
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.
What do you call a bad woman? Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets
tired of.
One can resist everything except temptation.
Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a
thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and
without that fine correspondence or form and spirit which is the only
thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
One can always know at once whether a man has home claims upon his life
or not. I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so
many married men.
A mother who doesn't part with a daughter every season has no real
affection.
To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to
be in harmony with others.
A really grand passion is comparatively rare nowadays. It is the
privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the
idle classes in a country.
There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be
always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them; I
sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is
quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of
anything you kill it; nothing survives being thought of.
What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has
survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters
of art it is one's last mood.
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
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.
The development of the race depends on the development of the
individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal the
intellectual standard is instantly lowered and often ultimately lost.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at
all.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has
become so rare in modern life.
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right
also.
The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with
Revelations.
In married life three is company and two is none.
Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in
the creator was not.
Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one
knows that life has exhausted him.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband.
When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women
try their luck; men risk theirs.
The highest criticism really is the record of one's own soul. It is more
fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is
more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not
abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of
autobiography, as it deals, not with the events, but with the thoughts
of one's life, not with life's physical accidents of deed or
circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of
the mind.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored
you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of
possessing the most perfect social tact.
Man--poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man--belongs to a sex that has
been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself;
it is in his race. The history of women is very different. They have
always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of
common-sense; they saw its dangers from the first.
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common-sense of the husband
than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a
man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational
being.
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like
stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner-parties.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work
when there is no definite object of any kind.
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most
difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for
wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form
of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the
saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.
Youth! There is nothing like it. It is absurd to talk of the ignorance
of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any
respect are persons much younger than myself. They seem in front of me.
Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an
art.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The
old are in life's lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life. Youth has
a kingdom waiting for it. Everyone is born a king, and most people die
in exile--like most kings.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe
anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It
instinctively feels that manners are of more importance than morals, and
in its opinion the highest respectability is of much less value than the
possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation
to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner or poor wine is
irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot
atone for half-cold entrees.
While, in the opinion of society, contemplation is the gravest thing of
which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture
it is the proper occupation of man.
Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong
way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its
comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always
wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long or not long
enough.
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst
in him.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. It is the symbol of
symbols. It reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it
shows us itself it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity.
Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What they like is to be
a man's last romance.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful
but the stupid who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
One regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets
them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our
perfection; through art and through art only, that we can shield
ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The
future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an
inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of
style.
They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an
impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes,
however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses
our lives. If these elements of beauty are real the whole thing simply
appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no
longer the actors but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both.
We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us.
When a woman finds out that her husband is absolutely indifferent to
her, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy or wears very smart bonnets
that some other woman's husband has to pay for.
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible
evils that result from the institution of private property.
It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever
really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than
we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he
cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of
most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For when
the ideal is realised it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
itself.
People who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others
have. The only difference is that their moods are rather meaningless.
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A
man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent
a pleasure.
Good women have such a limited view of life, their horizon is so small,
their interests so petty. The fact is they are not modern, and to be
modern is the only thing worth being nowadays.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both
are disappointed.
All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition
of what married women's property really is.
I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good
people at a moment's notice. As a man sows so let him reap.
Nothing refines but the intellect.
It is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the
first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful
position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the
kind.
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.
All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.
The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will
forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world
unless he has got women to back him--and women rule society. If you have
not got women on your side you are quite over. You might just as well be
a barrister or a stockbroker or a journalist at once.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existence.
But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been
understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because
the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by
pain instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of
which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic.
Women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They have wonderfully
primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves,
looking for their master all the same. They love being dominated.
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It
is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the way of the
gods must be prepared.
Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to
receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on
a coat--that is the only difference.
Criticism is itself an art. . . . It is no more to be judged by any low
standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that
he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour
or the unseen world of passion and thought. He does not even require for
the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his
purpose.
It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In
the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make
history, only a great man can write it.
If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that
those who call themselves good would be filled with a wild remorse and
those whom the world calls evil stirred with a noble joy. Each little
thing that we do passes into the great machine of life, which may grind
our virtues to powder and make them worthless or transform our sins into
elements of a new civilisation more marvellous and more splendid than
any that has gone before.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge
them, sometimes they forgive them.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise and that thinks too
much to be beautiful.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its
details. Details are always vulgar.
It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we see
it. It will grow naturally and simply flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It
will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not
prove things. It will know everything, and yet it will not busy itself
about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by
material things. It will have nothing, and yet it will have everything,
and whatever one takes from it it will still have, so rich it will be.
It will not be always meddling with others or asking them to be like
itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while
it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very
wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as
they ought to be.
Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen.
If one doesn't talk about a thing it has never happened. It is simply
expression that gives reality to things.
No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who
can't succeed in obtaining that worst and most necessary of evils, a
husband.
The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know
when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon
as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue
it. If they were allowed their way every comedy would have a tragic
ending and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly
artificial, but they have no sense of art.
Each time that one loves is the only time that one has ever loved.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely
intensifies it.
The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but
self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of
the rich.
Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is
nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its
curious crucible of pain and pleasure one cannot wear over one's face a
mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and
making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen
dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one
has to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to
pass through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what
a great reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to
one! To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional,
coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they meet, and where
they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they
are in discord--there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost
is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money
than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
That is the misery of being poor.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist--that is
all.
Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated
by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break
the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad without ever doing anything bad.
He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin
his true perfection.
Mediaeval art is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can
use them in fiction, of course; but then the only things that one can
use in fiction are the only things that one has ceased to use in fact.
Man is complete in himself.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value
of nothing.
It's the old, old story. Love--well, not at first sight--but love at the
end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory.
No nice girl should ever waltz with such particularly younger sons! It
looks so fast!
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.
Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give
us now and then some of those luxurious, sterile emotions that have a
certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They
are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
What is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is
unreadable and literature is unread.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked
and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
My husband is a sort of promissory note; I am tired of meeting him.
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman
over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they
have a history.
There is a fatality about good resolutions-they are always made too
late.
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of
life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That
is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely
uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain
to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being
cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity
of being either, so they stagnate.
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with
any woman so long as he does not love her.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is
the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance.
In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good
rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be
able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What
is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I
consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age
is a form of the grossest immorality.
Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about
those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once
felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be
concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such
things.
If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth,
the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
There are sins whose fascination is more in the memory than in the doing
of them, strange triumphs that gratify the pride more than the passions
and give to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than they
bring or can ever bring to the senses.
No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever
knows what a pleasure is.
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is
arrested.
ancient, history supplies us with many most painful examples of what I
refer to. If it were not so, indeed, history would be quite unreadable.
I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity
of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is
never advisable.
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life
he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of
profile.
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women
who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.
Never speak disrespectfully of society. Only people who can't get into
it do that.
It is always painful to part with people whom one has known for a very
brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with
equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has
just been introduced is almost unbearable.
To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his
temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of
reason.
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply
our personalities.
In a temple everyone should be serious except the thing that is
worshipped.
We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom
one has ceased to love.
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in
morals mean absolutely nothing.
To be in society is merely a bore, but to be out of it simply a tragedy.
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve
that to give an interest to one's old age.
What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but
simply life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he
can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever,
and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner,
healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is nature's test, her
sign of approval. When man is happy he is in harmony with himself and
his environment.
Society often forgives the criminal, it never forgives the dreamer.
It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so
difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
Conversation should touch on everything, but should concentrate itself
on nothing.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that
no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the
priest, that gives us absolution.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people
who know absolutely everything and people who know absolutely nothing.
The public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything except
genius.
Life makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the
meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
This horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think
the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that
there has been since that terrible thing they called the Higher
Education of Women was invented.
Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully
effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very
attractive.
Experience is a question of instinct about life.
What is true about art is true about life.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Women, as some witty Frenchman put it, inspire us with the desire to do
masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
The only way to behave to a woman, is to make love to her if she is
pretty and to someone else if she is plain.
Women give to men the very gold of their lives. Possibly; but they
invariably want it back in such very small change.
Define women as a sex? Sphinxes without secrets.
What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.
What do you call a bad woman? Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets
tired of.
One can resist everything except temptation.
Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a
thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and
without that fine correspondence or form and spirit which is the only
thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
One can always know at once whether a man has home claims upon his life
or not. I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so
many married men.
A mother who doesn't part with a daughter every season has no real
affection.
To be good is to be in harmony with oneself. Discord is to be forced to
be in harmony with others.
A really grand passion is comparatively rare nowadays. It is the
privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the
idle classes in a country.
There is no secret of life. Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be
always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them; I
sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is
quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of
anything you kill it; nothing survives being thought of.
What is truth? In matters of religion it is simply the opinion that has
survived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters
of art it is one's last mood.
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
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.
The development of the race depends on the development of the
individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal the
intellectual standard is instantly lowered and often ultimately lost.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at
all.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger, and danger has
become so rare in modern life.
When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right
also.
The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with
Revelations.
In married life three is company and two is none.
Out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in
the creator was not.
Don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one
knows that life has exhausted him.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband.
When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women
try their luck; men risk theirs.
The highest criticism really is the record of one's own soul. It is more
fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is
more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not
abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of
autobiography, as it deals, not with the events, but with the thoughts
of one's life, not with life's physical accidents of deed or
circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of
the mind.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
Talk to every woman as if you loved her and to every man as if he bored
you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of
possessing the most perfect social tact.
Man--poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man--belongs to a sex that has
been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself;
it is in his race. The history of women is very different. They have
always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of
common-sense; they saw its dangers from the first.
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common-sense of the husband
than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a
man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational
being.
It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like
stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner-parties.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work
when there is no definite object of any kind.
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most
difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for
wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form
of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the
saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.
Youth! There is nothing like it. It is absurd to talk of the ignorance
of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any
respect are persons much younger than myself. They seem in front of me.
Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an
art.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The
old are in life's lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life. Youth has
a kingdom waiting for it. Everyone is born a king, and most people die
in exile--like most kings.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe
anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It
instinctively feels that manners are of more importance than morals, and
in its opinion the highest respectability is of much less value than the
possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation
to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner or poor wine is
irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot
atone for half-cold entrees.
While, in the opinion of society, contemplation is the gravest thing of
which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture
it is the proper occupation of man.
Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong
way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its
comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always
wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long or not long
enough.
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst
in him.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. It is the symbol of
symbols. It reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it
shows us itself it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity.
Women have a more subtle instinct about things. What they like is to be
a man's last romance.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful
but the stupid who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
One regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets
them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our
perfection; through art and through art only, that we can shield
ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The
future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an
inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of
style.
They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an
impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes,
however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses
our lives. If these elements of beauty are real the whole thing simply
appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no
longer the actors but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both.
We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us.
When a woman finds out that her husband is absolutely indifferent to
her, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy or wears very smart bonnets
that some other woman's husband has to pay for.
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible
evils that result from the institution of private property.
It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever
really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than
we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he
cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of
most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For when
the ideal is realised it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
itself.
People who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others
have. The only difference is that their moods are rather meaningless.
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A
man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent
a pleasure.
Good women have such a limited view of life, their horizon is so small,
their interests so petty. The fact is they are not modern, and to be
modern is the only thing worth being nowadays.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both
are disappointed.
All men are married women's property. That is the only true definition
of what married women's property really is.
I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good
people at a moment's notice. As a man sows so let him reap.
Nothing refines but the intellect.
It is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the
first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful
position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the
kind.
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.
All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.
The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will
forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world
unless he has got women to back him--and women rule society. If you have
not got women on your side you are quite over. You might just as well be
a barrister or a stockbroker or a journalist at once.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existence.
But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been
understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because
the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by
pain instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of
which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic.
Women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. They have wonderfully
primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves,
looking for their master all the same. They love being dominated.
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It
is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the way of the
gods must be prepared.
Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to
receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on
a coat--that is the only difference.
Criticism is itself an art. . . . It is no more to be judged by any low
standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that
he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour
or the unseen world of passion and thought. He does not even require for
the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his
purpose.
It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In
the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make
history, only a great man can write it.
If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that
those who call themselves good would be filled with a wild remorse and
those whom the world calls evil stirred with a noble joy. Each little
thing that we do passes into the great machine of life, which may grind
our virtues to powder and make them worthless or transform our sins into
elements of a new civilisation more marvellous and more splendid than
any that has gone before.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge
them, sometimes they forgive them.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise and that thinks too
much to be beautiful.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its
details. Details are always vulgar.
It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we see
it. It will grow naturally and simply flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It
will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not
prove things. It will know everything, and yet it will not busy itself
about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by
material things. It will have nothing, and yet it will have everything,
and whatever one takes from it it will still have, so rich it will be.
It will not be always meddling with others or asking them to be like
itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while
it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very
wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as
they ought to be.
Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen.
If one doesn't talk about a thing it has never happened. It is simply
expression that gives reality to things.
No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who
can't succeed in obtaining that worst and most necessary of evils, a
husband.
The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know
when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon
as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue
it. If they were allowed their way every comedy would have a tragic
ending and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly
artificial, but they have no sense of art.
Each time that one loves is the only time that one has ever loved.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely
intensifies it.
The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but
self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of
the rich.
Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is
nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its
curious crucible of pain and pleasure one cannot wear over one's face a
mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and
making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen
dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one
has to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to
pass through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what
a great reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to
one! To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional,
coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they meet, and where
they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they
are in discord--there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost
is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money
than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
That is the misery of being poor.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist--that is
all.
Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated
by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break
the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad without ever doing anything bad.
He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin
his true perfection.
Mediaeval art is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can
use them in fiction, of course; but then the only things that one can
use in fiction are the only things that one has ceased to use in fact.
Man is complete in himself.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value
of nothing.
It's the old, old story. Love--well, not at first sight--but love at the
end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory.
No nice girl should ever waltz with such particularly younger sons! It
looks so fast!
Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.
Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give
us now and then some of those luxurious, sterile emotions that have a
certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They
are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
What is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is
unreadable and literature is unread.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked
and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
My husband is a sort of promissory note; I am tired of meeting him.
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman
over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they
have a history.
There is a fatality about good resolutions-they are always made too
late.
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of
life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That
is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely
uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain
to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being
cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity
of being either, so they stagnate.
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with
any woman so long as he does not love her.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is
the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance.
In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good
rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be
able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What
is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I
consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age
is a form of the grossest immorality.
Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about
those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once
felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be
concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such
things.
If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth,
the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
There are sins whose fascination is more in the memory than in the doing
of them, strange triumphs that gratify the pride more than the passions
and give to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than they
bring or can ever bring to the senses.
No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever
knows what a pleasure is.
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is
arrested.
