A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.