I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

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

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is to be massively overeducated.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.