Society and the World

It is better to be beautiful than to be good.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

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.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother.

Laugh and the world laughs with you;

‘Shoot, if you must, this old grey head,

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,

Camerado, this is no book,

I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Mrs Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men.

I look upon all the world as my parish.