Many birds and beasts are...as fit to go to Heaven as many human beings - people who talk of their seats there with as much confidence as if they had booked them at a box office.

Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice, not to the annals of a stage, however dignified.

Whatever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves... how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration.

The rapturuous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at somebody else's expense

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things.