A Writer's Notebook (8 page)

If women exhibit less emotion at pain it does not prove that they bear it better, but rather that they feel it less.

That love is chiefly the instinct for the propagation of the species shows itself in the fact that most men will fall in love with any woman in their way, and not being able to
get the first woman on whom they have set their heart, soon turn to a second.

It is but seldom that a man loves once and for all; it may only show that his sexual instincts are not very strong.

As soon as the instinct of propagation has been satisfied, the madness which blinded the lover disappears and leaves him with a wife to whom he is indifferent.

I do not know what is meant by abstract beauty. The beautiful is that which excites the æsthetic sense in the artist. What is beautiful to an artist today will be beautiful to all and sundry in ten years. Not so many years ago everyone would have said that nothing was more hideous than factory chimneys with black smoke belching from them; but certain artists discovered in them a decorative quality and painted them; they were laughed at at first, but little by little people saw beauty in their pictures and then looking at what they had painted saw beauty there too. It does not now require great perspicacity to receive as great a thrill of delight from a factory with its chimneys as from a green field with its flowers.

People wonder at the romantic lives of poets and artists, but they should rather wonder at their gift of expression. The occurrences which pass unnoticed in the life of the average man in the existence of a writer of talent are profoundly interesting. It is the man they happen to that makes their significance.

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

If the good were only a little less heavy-footed!

The philosopher is like a mountaineer who has with difficulty climbed a mountain for the sake of the sunrise, and arriving at the top finds only fog; whereupon he wanders down again. He must be an honest man if he doesn't tell you that the spectacle was stupendous.

Today reasons are hardly necessary to refute Christianity; there is a feeling in the air against it, and since religion is itself a feeling, feeling is the instrument to cope with it. One man has faith and the other hasn't; and there perhaps is the end of it: their respective arguments are only rationalisations of their feelings.

Those who live for the world and work for the world naturally demand the world's approval. But the man who lives for himself neither expects nor is affected by the world's approval. If he is indifferent to Tom, Dick and Harry, why should he care what they think of him?

The power of great joy is balanced by an equal power of great sorrow. Enviable is the man who feels little, so that he is unaffected either by the extremes of bliss or of grief. In the greatest happiness there is still an after-taste of bitterness, while misery is unalloyed.

No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.