The last person who ever crossed me is dead under my bed!!!
I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.
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 private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.
A virtuous abstinence from the joys of pederasty comes most easily to those who have no taste for it.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them.
Nothing worth knowing can be taught.
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.
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.