Quotes to inspire and reflect

And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?

On account of it [“the Love that dare not speak its name”] I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him.

The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare.

I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.

Life is never fair.

In all things connected with money I have had a luck so extraordinary that sometimes it has made me almost afraid. I remember havingread somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

You can’t make people good by Act of Parliament.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

Ernest Harrowden, one of those middle-agedmediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends.

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.

[ Sir Thomas Burdon :] They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris. . . .

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.

All art is immoral. . . . For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society.

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. 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.

The criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It does not confine itself . . . to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.

[George] Meredith’s a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as medium for writing in prose.

Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Day by day the old order of things changes, and new modes of thought pass over our world, and it may be that, before many years, talking will have taken the place of literature, and the personal screech silenced the music of impersonal utterance. Something of the dignity of the literary calling will probably be lost, and it is perhaps a dangerous thing for a country to be too eloquent.

Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.

The things of nature do not really belong tous; we should leave them to our children as we have received them.

That he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.

Blessings on thee, little man,

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

The Real War Will Never Get in the Books . And so good-bye to the war.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Passage to India.

A noiseless patient spider,

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two very differentthings, as the history of a science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisivemoments.