Revolutions go not backward.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
Our best history is still poetry.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.
Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.
Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment.
Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.
There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
