A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

I do not like new things of any kind, not even a new gown, far less a new acquaintance, therefore make as few as possible; one can but have one's heart and hands full, and mine are. I have love and work enough to last me the rest of my life.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords-philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

How often we have had cause to regret that the histrionic art, of all the fine arts the most intense in its immediate effect, should be, of all others, the most transient in its result! - and the only memorials it can leave behind, at best, so imperfect and so unsatisfactory!

Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.

There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities ties which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts.