The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.

Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.