Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

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.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

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

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.