One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

Ideas are, in truth, force.