Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.