If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.
I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.
I have been asked to explain what I meant by saying that Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. I have no notion when I said it or where I said it, or even whether I said it; in the sense tha...
He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.
He spoke in that sweet and steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practiced for hours together in his bedroom.
He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a h...
For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.
For even the most dehumanized modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.
Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples...
Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.
Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think
But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is t...
But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.
Because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulcher of Christ. But being in a civiliza...
Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a sh...
And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,And he sang aloud his laws,Because of the joy of giants,The joy without a cause.
An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to ev...
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had plan...
A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over...