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The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.
a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire. They were relieved from poverty.
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.
Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.
Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you.
What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is.
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it.
The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.
there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.
At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.’
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.
The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People.
For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.
For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly.
