The delight in natural things - colors, forms, scents - when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended.

There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.

The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we must have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it - thought 'furiously' often. And it is out of the many 'thinkings' of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows.

praise is a great tonic, and helps most people to do their best.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.