George Moore

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

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

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.

One must be in London to see the spring.

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

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.

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

He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted.

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.

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.

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

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it... you and you alone make me feel that I am alive... Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

Love — but not marriage. Marriage means a four-post bed and papa and mamma between eleven and twelve. Love is aspiration: transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream?

After all there is but one race — humanity.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.