Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.

Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.

Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.

Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth