It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.