In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

Things are always different from what they might be.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.