I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

One idea lights a thousand candles.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Every man should let out all the length of all the reigns; should find or make a frank and healthy expression of what force and meaning is in him.

Economy does not consist in saving the coal, but in using the time while it burns.