It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat.

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

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.