There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. [...] we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

... beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. [...] Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are. Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty was he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.