Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

A savage place! As holy and enchanted/As e'er beneath the waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud. We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colours a suffusion from that light.