A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.

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.

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.

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.

It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.