The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.

Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.

A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.