Aylmer Maude

There­fore I hated life; be­cause the work that is wrought un­der the sun is griev­ous unto me: for all is van­ity and vex­a­tion of spirit.

In con­tra­dis­tinc­tion to us, who the wiser we are the less we un­der­stand the mean­ing of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suf­fer and die, these folk live and suf­fer, and they ap­proach death and suf­fer­ing with tran­quil­lity and in most cases gladly.

It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lun­atic asylum; but then I only dimly sus­pec­ted this, and like all lun­at­ics, simply called all men lun­at­ics ex­cept my­self.

the ar­biter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it pro­gress, but it is my heart and I.

(Such people are the most fun­da­mental in­fi­dels, for if faith is for them a means of at­tain­ing any worldly aims, then cer­tainly it is not faith.)

moral per­fec­tion

With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, pas­sion­ate and alone, com­pletely alone when I sought good­ness.

So I lived for ten years.

­ment we—men of thought—have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we—artists and po­ets—who have the greatest in­flu­ence. Our vo­ca­tion is to teach man­kind.

But strange to say, though I un­der­stood this fraud and re­nounced it, yet I did not re­nounce the rank these people gave me: the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I na­ively ima­gined that I was a poet and artist and could teach every­body without my­self know­ing what I was teach­ing, and I ac­ted ac­cord­ingly.