"The virtue of art lies in detachment,..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.”

“The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.”

“But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Bobinson, and their parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing.”

“Why seek to embarrass [the artist] with vanities foreign to his quietness? Know you not that certain sciences require the whole man, leaving no part of him at leisure for your trifles?”

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”

“I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future.”

“I don't know how much money I've got. I did ask the accountant how much it came to. I wrote it down on a bit of paper. But I've lost the bit of paper.”

“Regard a king as someone unconcerned with kingship.”

“There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.”