Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade name of the firm.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect-simply a confession of failures.

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square: but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.