It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

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.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.