My criticisms are always simple; they are limited to one word:MOmit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and eve...ry page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak words and useless pages I have written; but the law is sound, and every book written without a superfluous page or word is a masterpiece. All the same, no one cares to apply so stern a law to another person. One has right to be severe only with oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on, to become a journalist, because that's what I want!... I can't imagine that I woul...d have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy ... and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and rando...m writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writ...ing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world comp...osed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"In 1665 the Court passed a law to inflict corporal punishment on all persons, who resided in the towns of this government, who de...nied the Scriptures." Think of a man being whipped on a spring morning, till he was constrained to confess that the Scriptures were true! "It was also voted by the town, that all persons who should stand out of the meeting-house during the time of divine service should be set in the stocks." It behooved such a town to see that sitting in the meeting-house was nothing akin to sitting in the stocks, lest the penalty of obedience to the law might be greater than that of disobedience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »