It was only in the theatre that I lived.
The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.
The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
Always be a little unexpected.
Authority is quite degrading.
Don’t feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much.
I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean.
Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train.
The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.
America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.
In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: ‘Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.’
I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.
America is not a country, it is a world.
Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne.
The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.
I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one’s life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon’s head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.