Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.

We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.