“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.

We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,–the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts.

Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where “I admire” is but a synonyme for “I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ,” is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!

A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.

Man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

No man does anything from a single motive.

Nothing can permanently please, which doesn’t contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.

It is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble – all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure!

In my opinion, there is a huge lack of imaginative, unconventional music being created by artists today and what little there is, goes widely unappreciated by the masses

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science.

People who get Nobel prizes aren’t necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.