ad handles or
not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of
family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French
Revolution.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

There must be a new Hedonism that shall recreate life and save it from
that harsh, uncomely Puritanism that is having, in our own day, its
curious revival. It must have its service of the intellect, certainly,
yet it must never accept any theory or system that will involve the
sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, is to
be experience itself and not the fruits of experience, bitter or sweet
as they may be. Of the aestheticism that deadens the senses, as of the
vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it is to know nothing. But it is to
teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
itself but a moment.

Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life,
just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not
necessarily realistic in an age of realism nor spiritual in an age of
faith. So far from being the creation of its time it is usually in
direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us
is the history of its own progress.

People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear
clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good
intentions are invariably ungrammatical.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the
improbable.

When art is more varied nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.

If a man is sufficiently imaginative to produce evidence in support of a
lie he might just as well speak the truth at once.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact;
the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of
fiction.

Nature is no great mother who has home us. She is our own creation. It
is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see
them, and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have
influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

The proper school to learn art in is not life but art.

I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice,
or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too
much.

I wouldn't marry a man with a future before him for anythin