I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.

Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession.

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.