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.
To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.
Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.
As a rule, I think they are quite impossible. Geniuses talk so much, don’t they? Such a bad habit! And they are always thinking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me.
However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large.
I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching -that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of someone older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.
I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
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.
Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself.
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.