George Moore Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

George Moore
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
My one claim to originality among Irishmen is that I have never made a speech.

George Moore
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
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
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. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes.

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

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

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

George Moore
There is always a right and a wrong way, and the wrong way always seems the more reasonable.

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

George Moore
If there were no husbands, who would look after our mistresses?

George Moore
My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes.

George Moore
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
There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities. For as those majestic, magisterial truck-horses of the docks, I would as soon think of striking a judge on the bench, as to lay violent hand upon their holy hides.

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

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

George Moore
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.

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

George Moore
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
Monet began by imitating Manet, and Manet ended by imitating Monet.

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

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

George Moore
The difference between my quotations and those of the next man is that I leave out the inverted commas.

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

George Moore
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