Only good questions deserve good answers.

It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.