And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice – everywhere open to the truth.
The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.
The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.
To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.
There is a tiny yellow daffodil, The butterfly can see it from afar, Although one summer evening’s dew could fill Its little cup twice over, ere the star Had called the lazy shepherd to his fold, And be no prodigal.
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.
Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.
Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich.
Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris.
You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
It is what we fear that happens to us.
Varnishing is the only artistic process with which Royal Academicians are thoroughly familiar.