The English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart

It is always the unreadable that occurs.