Say what we will, we may be sure that ambition is an error. Its wear and tear on the heart are never recompensed.

Poverty has strange bedfellows.

Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?

Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

When a man is not amused, he feels an involuntary contempt for those who are.

The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing

Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.