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vived. In matters of science it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art it is one's last mood. It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. Life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey, windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed. There are two ways of disliking art One is to dislike it and the other to like it rationally. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be mere visionaries. I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the marked price of any single thing. Punctuality is the thief of time. Self-culture is the true ideal for man. There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about. No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not. There are things that are right to say but that may be said at the wrong time and to the wrong people. The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beauti
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