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Happiness

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
• A flower blossoms for its own joy.
• A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
• 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.
• How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
• Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
• Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.
• The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
• The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
• With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?    
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Embracing life

• Live the wonderful life that is in you.
• To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
• We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
• One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

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Action

• Action: The last resource of those who know not how to dream.
• Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.
• The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
• The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man does.
• To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

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Dreaming

• A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
• Action: The last resource of those who know not how to dream.

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Purpose

• Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
• The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.

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Mystery

• The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
• The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

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Spontaneity

• Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.

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Intentions

• Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
• Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

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Passion

• Behind the perfection of a man’s style, must lie the passion of a man’s soul.

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Friendship

• A good friend will always stab you in the front.
• An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.
• Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.
• Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
• He [Bernard Shaw] hasn’t an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him.
• He has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends.
• I always like to know everything about my new friends and nothing about my old ones.
• I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
• Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
• No matter who broke your heart, or how long it takes to heal, you’ll never get through it without your friends.
• Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation.

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Success

• Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
• Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.
• The play was a great success, but the audience was a failure.

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Truth

• A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
• Everything popular is wrong.
• If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
• Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.  
• The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

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Reason

• I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
• Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

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Pleasure

• I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
• Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
• Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
• Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.
• Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world.

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Prayer

• Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
• When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

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Simplicity

• I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
• I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
• Life is not complex. We are complex.  Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

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Beauty

• Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
• Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
• Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one  another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.
• In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.
• It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But … it is better to be good than to be ugly.
• No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
• Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.
• 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.
• Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
• Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
• She is a peacock in everything but beauty.

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Know and be yourself

• Know Thyself” was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, “Be Thyself” shall be written.
• Only the shallow know themselves.

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Pessimism and optimism

• A pessimist is one who when he has a choice of two evils chooses both.
• A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
• If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
• Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
• The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

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Ideas

• All great ideas are dangerous.
• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

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Ambition

• Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
• Ambition is the last refuge of failure.

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Sincerity

• A little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
• The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.
• What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

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Punctuality

• He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

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Gratitude and appreciation

• If you don’t get everything you want, think of the things you don’t get that you don’t want.
• It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.
• The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.

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Kindness

• The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.

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Giving

• Those who have much are often greedy, those who have little always share.
• To give and not expect return that is what lies at the heart of love.

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Moderation

• Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

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Learning and education

• Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
• Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
• Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

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Experience

• Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
• Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
• The young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
• To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s life.  It is no less than a denial of the soul.  
• We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

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Imagination (and the lack of it)

• Consistency : The last refuge of the unimaginative. 
• Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
• It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
• The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
• To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

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Sympathy

• If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

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Genius

• Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
• Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
• I have nothing to declare except my genius.
• I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
• Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
• The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

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Self-love

• I have never given adoration to any body except myself.
• I don’t at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.
• I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
• I have nothing to declare except my genius.
• I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
• The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
• To love oneself is the beginning of a life long romance.

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Taste

• Good taste is the excuse I’ve always given for leading such a bad life.
• He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.
• I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
• It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

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Vice and virtue

• 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.
• He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.
• I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
• It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. 
• Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
• The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
• There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
• Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

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Morality and hypocrisy

• Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.
• A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
• And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
• I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
• Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
• Morality like art means a drawing a line someplace.
• Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
• To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle- class respectability.
• What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

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Temptation

• Don’t tempt me I can resist anything but temptation.
• Do you really think … that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. 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.
• Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
• The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

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Poverty

• Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
• The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
• There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
• Who, being loved, is poor?

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Reputation

• One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation.

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Death

• Biography lends to death a new terror.
• Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
• Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
• He has fought a good fight and has had to face every difficulty except popularity.
• One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation.

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Selfishness

• Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

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Arguments

• Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.
• Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
• I like to do all the talking myself; it saves time and prevents arguments.

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Blame

• There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

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Emotions

• The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
• A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
• The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
• There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

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War

• As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

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Deception

• The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived.

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Ignorance

• I do not approve of anything which tampers with natural ignorance.

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Advice

• I always pass on good advice. It’s the only thing to do with it.  It is never any use to oneself. 
• It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.
• It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.
• Expert: An ordinary man away from home giving advice.
• The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.

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Enemies

• A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
• Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
• An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.
• He [Bernard Shaw] hasn’t an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him.
• He has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends.
• I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
• In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

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Tragedy

• There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
• There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.
• Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.
• All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
• I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
• The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
• The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
• To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

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Conformity

• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
• Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
• A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

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Danger

• Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living.
• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

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Pain

• There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

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Gossip

• History is merely gossip.
• I don’t at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.
• If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
• It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one’s back, that are absolutely and entirely true.
• Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
• There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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Seriousness

• It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.
• Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
• Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
• Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

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Stupidity

• Irony is wasted on the stupid.
• Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity.
• The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.
• There is no sin except stupidity.
• Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

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Mistakes

• Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

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Cynicism

• What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Unfairness

• Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

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Love

• A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.
• A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
• Hatred is blind, as well as love.
• I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
• People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
• The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
• There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
• Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love’s tragedies.
• To give and not expect return that is what lies at the heart of love.
• Women are made to be loved, not understood.
• Who, being loved, is poor?
• Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.
• When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what world calls a romance.
• When a love comes to an end, weaklings cry, efficient ones instantly find another love, and the wise already have one in reserve.
• When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

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Marriage

• Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
• How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
• In married life three is company and two none.
• It is he who has broken the bond of marriage — not I. I only break its bondage.
• Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage which is never advisable.
• Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
• Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed.
• One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
• Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women’s husbands.
• The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
• The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.
• There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.
• There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.

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Romance

• A kiss may ruin a human life.
• A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
• Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
• Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
• He must have a truly romantic nature, for he weeps when there is nothing at all to weep about.
• If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
• Life is one fool thing after another where as love is two fool things after each other.
• Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.
• Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.
• Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
• Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.
• The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
• They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.
• Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends up blocking his retreat.
• While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.
• When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what world calls a romance.
• The heart was made to be broken.

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Sex

• Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

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Men verse women

• A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
• A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.
• All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
• Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
• Don’t give a woman advice; one should never give a woman anything she can’t wear in the evening.
• How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
• I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
• Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.
• Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed.
• Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
• 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 strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women … merely adored.
• Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
• Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

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Art

• A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
• A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
• All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
• All art is quite useless.
• The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.
• Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
• Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
• Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
• Art never expresses anything but itself.
• Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.
• Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
• Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.
• Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
• God and other artists are always a little obscure.
• I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.
• In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.
• It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
• It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
• It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
• It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
• Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
• Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
• Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
• No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.
• No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
• Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
• Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.
• Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
• The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.
• The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.
• The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.
• While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.
• Alone, and without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
• A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
• The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

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Food and eating

• After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
• I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
• I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.

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Reading

• If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
• I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
• It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

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Music

• I like Wagner’s music better than any other music; it is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says.
• If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.
• Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.

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Nature

• It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

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Poetry

• All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
• A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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Conversation

• If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
• If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.
• Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
• The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
• To have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact, talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you.
• Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation.

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Fashion

• Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
• Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.

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Alcohol

• I drink to separate my body from my soul.
• I have made an important discovery… that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effect of intoxication.

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Family

• Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
• Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
• To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

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Wealth, money and spending

• Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
• It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
• It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
• Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
• Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything, and when they grow older, they know it.
• When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
• When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.
• Time is waste of money.

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News and journalism

• By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
• Newspapers … chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
• The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is never read.
• The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
• There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
• There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

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The past

• No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
• One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

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Destiny

• As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

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Politics

• Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

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God

• I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
• God and other artists are always a little obscure.
• People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards.

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Democracy

• Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

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Society

• Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
• Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
• I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

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Youth and age

• An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
• As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
• I am not young enough to know everything.
• In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
• No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
• One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age.
• The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
• The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age.
• The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
• The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
• The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
• The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
• The young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
• Those whom the gods love grow young.
• To get back my youth I would do anything in the world except take exercise get up early or be respectable.

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Memory

• Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

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America

• America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
• America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.
• America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
• In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.
• In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
• In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.
• Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
• When good Americans die they go to Paris.

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London

• London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know.

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• How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.
• I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.
• It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
• It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.
• I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky.
• If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
• Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
• She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes; that is always a sign of despair in a woman.
• In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
• Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
• Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.
• One can give a really unbiased opinion only about things that do not interest one.
• One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
• One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
• All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
• Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.
• Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.
• The English country gentleman galloping after a fox is the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
• The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.
• The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
• The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
• The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
• The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
• The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
• The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.
• There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
• There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
• There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
• This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
• To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
• To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.
• We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
• What seems to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
• What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
• When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it.
• When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
• White-seeded is her crimson mouth.
• Why was I born with such contemporaries?
• You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

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