First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.