The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.
Credit is a young man’s capital.
All bad art is the result of good intentions.
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.
You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.
Tea is the only simple pleasure left to us.
I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.
It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.
As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.
The trouble with women is, that when they grow up, they turn into their mothers. The trouble with men is, that they don’t.
To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self.
Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.
Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!
Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame.