Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.

A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.