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Quotes of the day: George Moore
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Published Monday, February 23, 2015 @ 8:59 PM EST
Feb 23 2015

George Augustus Moore (February 24, 1852 - January 21, 1933) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly influenced by the works of Émile Zola. His writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and, although Moore's work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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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.

All reformers are bachelors.

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

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

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.

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.

I would lay aside the wisest book to talk to a stupid woman.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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 world wants geniuses, but it wants them to behave just like other people.

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible.

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.

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

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(February 24 is also the birthday of Steve Jobs and Mitch Hedberg.)


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