To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.
There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening’s dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal.
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.
Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.
Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich.
Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
It is what we fear that happens to us.
Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.
It is absurd to say that the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun.
By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar and an Idealism that is void.
Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. 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.
It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.
Nature constantly imitates art.
Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.
To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not – there is no weakness in that.