Satirists From England

"If I die prematurely, at any rate I shall be saved from being bored by my own success."

"Nothing is so cruel as to try and force a man beyond his natural pace."

"It is said of money that it is more easily made than kept and this is true of many things, such as friendship; and even life itself is more easily got than kept."

"The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it."

"Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost."

"If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much."

"The composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to and essential in the other."

"After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate."

"Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good, simple, credulous organ — very ready to take things on trust if it be told them with any confidence of assertion."

"One reason why it is as well not to give very much detail is that, no matter how much is given, the eye will always want more; it will know very well that it is not being paid in full. On the other hand, no matter how little one gives, the eye will generally compromise by wanting only a little more. In either case the eye will want more, so one may as well stop sooner or later. Sensible painting, like sensible law, sensible writing, or sensible anything else, consists as much in knowing what to omit as what to insist upon."

"An artist's touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing."

"Art has no end in view save the emphasising and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection."

"Sketching from nature is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely."

"Honesty consists not in never stealing but in knowing where to stop in stealing, and how to make good use of what one does steal."

"Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted."

"If you tie Handel's hands by debarring him from the rendering of human emotion, and if you set Bach's free by giving him no human emotion to render — if, in fact, you rob Handel of his opportunities and Bach of his difficulties — the two men can fight after a fashion, but Handel will even so come off victorious."

"When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence."

"They say the test of this [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say “Can he name a kitten?” And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot."

"A man's style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible."

"A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted."

"Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel should be heard on both sides."

"Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised beings are."

"In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance to you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities go on the precisely opposite system."

"There is nothing less powerful than knowledge unattached, and incapable of application. That is why what little knowledge I have has done myself personally so much harm. I do not know much, but if I knew a good deal less than that little I should be far more powerful."

"My notes always grow longer if I shorten them. I mean the process of compression makes them more pregnant and they breed new notes."

"Always eat grapes downwards — that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last."

"All things are like exposed photographic plates that have no visible image on them till they have been developed."

"[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them."

"The written law is binding, but the unwritten law is much more so. You may break the written law at a pinch and on the sly if you can, but the unwritten law — which often comprises the written — must not be broken. Not being written, it is not always easy to know what it is, but this has got to be done."

"Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use."

"Words impede and either kill, or are killed by, perfect thought; but they are, as a scaffolding, useful, if not indispensable, for the building up of imperfect thought and helping to perfect it."

"The mere fact that a thought or idea can be expressed articulately in words involves that it is still open to question; and the mere fact that a difficulty can be definitely conceived involves that it is open to solution."

"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have."

"Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get; it is through this that we are linked with God."

"We can no longer separate things as we once could: everything tends towards unity; one thing, one action, in one place, at one time. On the other hand, we can no longer unify things as we once could; we are driven to ultimate atoms, each one of which is an individuality. So that we have an infinite multitude of things doing an infinite multitude of actions in infinite time and space; and yet they are not many things, but one thing."

"All eating is a kind of proselytising — a kind of dogmatising — a maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the eatee's."

"When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!"

"Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself."

"Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking pains."

"Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever."

"An energy is a soul — a something working in us."

"In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly would be to cease to understand at all."

"All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of criticising with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely to give us, pleasure or no."

"We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers."

"Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die."

"To be is to think and to be thinkable. To live is to continue thinking and to remember having done so."

"Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage."

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

"We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness, we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals."

"Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money — or the want of money; but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order."