The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.

Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.

Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is uncomparingly the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men.

This is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain.

If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.

Truth is the nursing mother of genius.

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself