Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age--the only perfectly beautiful things on earth--joyous, innocent, half divine--useless, say they who are wiser than God.

In its permission to man to render subject to him all other living creatures of the earth, it continued the cruelty of the barbarian and the pagan, and endowed these with what appeared a divine authority.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

There is a self-evident axiom, that she who is born a beauty is half married.

Nature I believe in. True art aims to, represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal--partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me.