A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
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England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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The sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is...
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It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
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Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her niece of being illogical. For some time she could not be brought to understand what logic was, and when she grasped its true nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous. 'Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!' she exclaimed. 'How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?' Her nieces, educated young women, thought that she was pass
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Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
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I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism, and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on wh...
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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections—closer connections than Art will allow.
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Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.
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Because he once wrote, 'We must love one another or die,' he can command me to follow him.
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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
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