No More Learning

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There
is the despot who tyrannises over soul and body alike. The first is
called the prince. The second is called the pope. The third is called
the people.

Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most important, perhaps the
most important, sign of the manners, customs, and mode of life of each
century.

I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic
to be in love, but there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal.
Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement
is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is
quite out of date.

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they
are better.

Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow.

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that
are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one
sweeps away all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand.

To disagree with three-fourths of England on all points is one of the
first elements of vanity, which is a deep source of consolation in all
moments of spiritual doubt.

Women live by their emotions and for them, they have no philosophy of
life.

As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have a fascination.
When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular.

There is only one thing worse than injustice, and that is justice
without her sword in her hand. When right is not might it is evil.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life.
Well, the secret of life is in art.

The truth isn't quite the sort of thing that one tells to a nice, sweet,
refined girl.

If one plays good music people don't listen, and if one plays bad music
people don't talk.

How fond women are of doing dangerous things. It is one of the qualities
in them that I admire most. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world
as long as other people are looking on.

Englishwomen conceal their feelings till after they are married. They
show them then.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are
perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.

Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.

In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is
that whose contradictory is also true.

One's days are too brief to take the burden of another's sorrows on
one's shoulders. Each man lives his own life, and pays his own price for
living it. The only pity is that one has to pay so often for a single
fault. One has to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with
man Destiny never closes her accounts.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we
are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow
people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity I call either
the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a
microscope.

Of Shakespeare it may be said that he was the first to see the dramatic
value of doublets and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.

Plain women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful women never
are! They never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous
of other people's husbands.

What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime and the
duties exacted from one after one's death land has ceased to be either a
profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from
keeping it up.

A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is
invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a
woman as a nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I am glad
to say.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier
than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even
glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing
a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is
charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious
by morality.

All beautiful things belong to the same age.

It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of
them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too
clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious
and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say
in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one's
relations.

To know nothing about our great men is one of the necessary elements of
English education.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very
tedious if it were either and modern literature a complete
impossibility.

You may laugh, but it is a great thing to come across a woman who
thoroughly understands one.

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated
altruism.

The number of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is
perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean
linen in public.

The chief thing that makes life a failure from the artistic point of
view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security--the fact that
one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has
given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious
except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing and never has been.
It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious
form of intellect I know is the British intellect, and on the British
intellect the illiterate always plays the drum.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either
charming or tedious.

It is only the modern that ever become old-fashioned.

It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the
vulgar test of production.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be
perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely
deaf.

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow
old-fashioned quite suddenly.

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The
domestic virtues are not the true basis of art.

To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just
as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so
completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

The only horrible thing in the world is 'ennui. ' That is the one sin for
which there is no forgiveness.

French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that
they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh,
which is worse.

It has often been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of
letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision
and inversity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are
preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of so much
importance.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to
dominate the work of art.

One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life. The
less said about life's sores the better.

You can't make people good by act of Parliament--that is something.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes
on to other things. Nature, on the other hand, forgetting that imitation
can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating the effect
until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things
against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to
him non-existent.

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who
would tell one that would tell one anything.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively
brutal about the good temper of most modern men. I wonder we women stand
it as well as we do.

The truth is a thing I get rid of as soon as possible. Bad habit, by the
way, makes one very unpopular at the club . . . with the older members.
They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is.

My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.

Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue--that is the worst of
women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they
meet us they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite
irretrievably bad and to leave us quite unattractively good.

Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid
of the world's tongue.

Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only
difference between them.

To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of
all the arts.

I don't believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don't think there
is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made
love to her. It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable.

When I am in trouble eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed,
when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately
will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink.

When one is going to lead an entirely new life one requires regular and
wholesome meals.

The soul is born old, but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The
body is born young, and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down anything
except a good reputation.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is
with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what men should
not have been. The present is what men ought not to be. The future is
what artists are.

Men become old, but they never become good.

By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent
public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads
weaker vessels astray.

I think that in practical life there is something about success, actual
success, that is a little unscrupulous, something about ambition that is
scrupulous always.

Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons.
What this century worships is wealth. The god of this century is wealth.
To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't
interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than
enough is as good as a feast.

The English can't stand a man who is always saying he is in the right,
but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It
is one of the best things in them.

Life is simply a 'mauvais quart d'heure' made up of exquisite moments.

There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and
innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of
life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that
one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands and
abominably conceited when they are not.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion,
enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting
clever people. This has become an absolute public nuisance.

I don't think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far
as he can, and that is not far, is it?

I am not quite sure that I quite know what pessimism really means. All I
do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot
be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy,
that is the explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation
of the next.

I do not approve of anything that that tampers with natural arrogance.
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it, and the blossom is
gone.
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately,
in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it
did it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably
lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so
calculating.

Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the
sake of emotion is the aim of life and of that practical organisation of
life that we call society.

Men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to
the influence of the physical charms of others. 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.