скачать книгу бесплатно
An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand.
To disagree with three-fourths of England on all points is one of the first elements of vanity, which is a deep source of consolation in all moments of spiritual doubt.
Women live by their emotions and for them, they have no philosophy of life.
As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have a fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular.
There is only one thing worse than injustice, and that is justice without her sword in her hand. When right is not might it is evil.
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.
The truth isn't quite the sort of thing that one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.
If one plays good music people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
How fond women are of doing dangerous things. It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
Englishwomen conceal their feelings till after they are married. They show them then.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.
Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.
In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.
One's days are too brief to take the burden of another's sorrows on one's shoulders. Each man lives his own life, and pays his own price for living it. The only pity is that one has to pay so often for a single fault. One has to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man Destiny never closes her accounts.
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope.
Of Shakespeare it may be said that he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands; beautiful women never are! They never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people's husbands.
What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one's death land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up.
A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I am glad to say.
It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip, but scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
All beautiful things belong to the same age.
It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one's relations.
To know nothing about our great men is one of the necessary elements of English education.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either and modern literature a complete impossibility.
You may laugh, but it is a great thing to come across a woman who thoroughly understands one.
The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism.
The number of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
The chief thing that makes life a failure from the artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security – the fact that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious form of intellect I know is the British intellect, and on the British intellect the illiterate always plays the drum.
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
It is only the modern that ever become old-fashioned.
It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production.
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.
The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art.
To the philosopher women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
The only horrible thing in the world is 'ennui.' That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.
French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh, which is worse.
It has often been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and inversity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of so much importance.
The work of art is to dominate the spectator. The spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
You can't make people good by act of Parliament – that is something.
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes on to other things. Nature, on the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating the effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent.
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men. I wonder we women stand it as well as we do.
The truth is a thing I get rid of as soon as possible. Bad habit, by the way, makes one very unpopular at the club … with the older members. They call it being conceited. Perhaps it is.
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue – that is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad and to leave us quite unattractively good.
Men are such cowards. They outrage every law in the world and are afraid of the world's tongue.
Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.
To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.
I don't believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don't think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable.
When I am in trouble eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink.
When one is going to lead an entirely new life one requires regular and wholesome meals.
The soul is born old, but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young, and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what men should not have been. The present is what men ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
Men become old, but they never become good.
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray.
I think that in practical life there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous, something about ambition that is scrupulous always.
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The god of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
The English can't stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them.
Life is simply a 'mauvais quart d'heure' made up of exquisite moments.
There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
Married men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands and abominably conceited when they are not.
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. This has become an absolute public nuisance.
I don't think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it?
I am not quite sure that I quite know what pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.
I do not approve of anything that that tampers with natural arrogance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it, and the blossom is gone.
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of life and of that practical organisation of life that we call society.
Men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less than ancient, history supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, history would be quite unreadable.
I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.
The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of profile.
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.
Never speak disrespectfully of society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
It is always painful to part with people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
In a temple everyone should be serious except the thing that is worshipped.
We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.
