However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

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

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Some temptations are so great it takes great courage to yield to them.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.