Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
Samuel Butler (novelist)
I am the enfant terrible of literature and science.
literature science
Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else.
literature music religion
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
faith
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.
work
If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.
All men can do great things, if they know what great things are.
men
The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.
He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I dare say I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all.
music
I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
mind
To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.
chance trust
Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
pain
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.
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