Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

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

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.