I am speechless: what can I answer? I put hand on my mouth. I have said too much already; now I will speak no more.
He doesn't hear but sees the Voice.
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.
Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of Drink--as if drink could be a problem. When pe...
it will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.
The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they hav...
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.
