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.