The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.