There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.
For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer.
Fate weaves the darkness, which is perhaps why she weaves so badly.
Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
A man's work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.
Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.
Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.
Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.
Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.
It is so much easier to covet what one hasn't than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn't.
Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.
There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.
The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
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