Life is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments.
*
Life is terribly deficient in form.
Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people.
There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies
seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it.
Things last either too long or not long enough.
*
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.
I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard
of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.
*
There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life fully, entirely, completely, or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
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To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist — that is all.
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Comfort is the only thing our civilisation can give us.
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The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
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The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for.
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Self-culture is the true ideal for man.
*
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediæval days.
*
While, in the opinion of society, contemplation is the gravest thing of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
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Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour.
*
Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure one cannot wear over one's face a mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one has to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to pass through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what a great reward one receives !
How wonderful the whole world becomes to one !
To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional, coloured life of the intellect — to observe where they meet, and where they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they are in discord — there is a delight in that ! What matter what the cost is ?
One can never pay too high a price for any sensation.
*
Nature is no great mother who has home us. She is our own creation.
It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them,
and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have influenced us.
To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
*
Beauty is a form of genius — is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time,
or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
It cannot be questioned, it has its divine right of sovereignty.
*
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection;
through art and through art only, that we can shield ourselves
from the sordid perils of actual existence.
*
Those who live in marble or on painted panel know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal, indeed, in its beauty but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them. They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they grow old.
It is always dawn for St Helena as Veronese saw her at the window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon — of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim, naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute player rest idly upon the chords.
*
It will be a marvellous thing — the true personality of man — when we see it.
It will grow naturally and simply flowerlike, or as a tree grows.
It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute.
It will not prove things. It will know everything, and yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. 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 it will be. It will not be always meddling with others or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different.
And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all,
as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is.
The personality of man will be very wonderful.
It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
