It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.

A man may be a great statesman, and yet dislike his wife, and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero, and yet he may have an unseemly passion, or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this. ... It thinks, unhappily or happily as you may choose to consider, that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them.

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.

Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong. Gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes, and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battlefields of earth.

Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.

Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

Love is cruel as the grave.