George Moore

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

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

One must be in London to see the spring.

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.

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

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

After all there is but one race — humanity.

All reformers are bachelors.

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

We all want notoriety; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible.

Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then, after a season, …

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

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.

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

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

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