George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

I have always noticed that when a fellow wants to finish a play, the only way to do it is to go away to the country and leave no address.

— George Moore (novelist)

He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted.

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it... you and you alone make me feel that I am alive... Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

— George Moore (novelist)

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.

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach.

— George Moore (novelist)

Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible.

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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.

— George Moore (novelist)

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?

— George Moore (novelist)

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.

— George Moore (novelist)

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 literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person.

— George Moore (novelist)

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.

— George Moore (novelist)

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.

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

All reformers are bachelors.

— George Moore (novelist)

After all there is but one race — humanity.

— George Moore (novelist)

The difficulty in life is the choice.

— George Moore (novelist)

The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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.

— George Moore (novelist)

One must be in London to see the spring.

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)

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

— George Moore (novelist)