Status Updates From Beautiful and Impossible Th...

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons

The past is what man should not have been, the present is what man ought not to be, the future is what artists are

state is to make useful, man to make beautiful.

I'm quite fascinated by this political essay, I was not expecting this hedonistic socialism

My favourite sentences in all philosophy:

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholic.

One does not see anything until they see its beauty

I want to see the sunset and what was it? It was simply a second rate Turner

It's fortunate that nature is so imperfect, otherwise we would have no art.

I love this essay so much

It sometimes happens in a premier in London that the least interesting part is the play

What is truth? One's last mood

"To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less." (The Soul of Man Under Socialism)

The House Beautiful - lit. Interior Design, beauty = morality (disagree), things should be either purposeful or beautiful, not clutter (agree), advice for the rich

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Only the shallow know themselves. Time is a waste of money. […] The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over dressed is by being always absolutely over educated.

If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.

To be really medieval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes

The 19th century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The 19th century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in a glass.

Fortunately, in America, Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote King Lear.

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.

It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth, its aim. So that man
thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.