I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.' Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.

Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.

He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.