There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating- people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

Digital imaging allows both groups to rise above the limitations of mess and clutter and mechanics, and apply our talents to creating images limited only by our imaginations.

You can teach an old dog new tricks with the right kind of doggie treats.

True individuality is the repose arising from the relation of a self to all it has to do with. Bad individuality has in it a separation between outward action and a flat repose inwardly.

The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

No serious-minded man should have time for the mediocre in any phase of his living.

Keep us, Lord, so awake in the duties of our calling that we may sleep in thy peace and wake in thy glory.

Do not call procrastination laziness. Call it fear.

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.