The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.
I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.
It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.
Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.
Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are-of immeasurable stature.
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.
The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.
Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.
Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset.
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
Pride juggles with her toppling towers, They strike the sun and cease, But the firm feet of humility They grip the ground like trees.
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.
We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.
I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don’t, as a rule.
We all know that the ‘divine glory of the ego’ is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility in other people.
Whatever the word “great” means, Dickens was what it means.