I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.

The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common sense.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.