A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

Christ did not die to save people, but to teach people how to save each other. This is, I have no doubt, a grave heresy, but it is also a fact.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

Just be your self. Everybody else is already taken.

My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.