George Moore Quotes

Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible.

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.

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.

Self is man's main business; all outside of self is uncertain, all comes from self, all returns to self.

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.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

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