Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
I think patriotism is like charity – it begins at home.
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
Writing is not primarily escape, but use.
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.
To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.
Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
All intimacies are based on differences.
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.