The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!

you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.