Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises.

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.

Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.

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.

It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables, and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway.

Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.

You know the Ark of Israel and the calf of Belial were both made of gold. Religion has never yet changed the metal of her one adoration.