George Moore

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

Faith goes out of the window when beauty comes in at the door.

One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created, how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in ultimate wonder and admiration.

After all there is but one race — humanity.

The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind.

My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes.

Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible.

We all want notoriety; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical.

Acting is therefore the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all.

The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece.

One must be in London to see the spring.

Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice.

It would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of men and women as casual as that of animals.

We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination.

I have always noticed that when a fellow wants to finish a play, the only way to do it is to go away to the country and leave no address.