Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

Only longing can fill with more of itself.

Theories then are dangerous things.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.