George Moore Quotes

I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead.

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

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.

After all there is but one race — humanity.

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.

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

But if you want to be a painter you must go to France — France is the only school of Art.

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

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

It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person.

Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his.

Humanity is a pigsty, where lions, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate.

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

I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes.