s for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the earth, that
green-tressed goddess, as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for
their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection.
The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of
growth or change. If they know nothing of death it is because they know
little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and
to those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not
merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of
glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be
truly realised by literature alone. It is literature that shows us the
body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

Behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic.
Worlds have to be in travail that the merest flower may blow.

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.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and
your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself.

Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.

He's sure to be a wonderful success. He thinks like a Tory and talks
like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

We make gods of men and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and
they fawn and are faithful.

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.

To me beauty is the Wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do
not judge by appearances.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of
the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
its proper value.

Women have no appreciation of good looks in men--at least good women
have none.

To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think
his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are
not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone