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.