To think of playing cricket for hard cash! Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun.

The power of admiring whatever is deserving of admiration, the nice and quick perception of the beautiful and the true, is one of the highest and noblest of our faculties, born of taste, and knowledge, and wisdom, or rather it is taste, and wisdom, and knowledge, in one rare and great combination.

I foresee that the Andersen and Fairy Tale fashion will not last; none of these things away from general nature do.

Fashion is a capricious deity.

I detest so much ... those persons, who insist upon telling you everything -- who labor every point, as the lawyers say, as if they thought all excellence consisted in length.

I do not think very highly of Madame D'Arblay's books. The style is so strutting. She does so stalk about on Dr. Johnson's old stilts.

Well, great authors are great people -- but I believe that they are best seen at a distance.

Does it not appear to you versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called genius-versatility and playfulness? In my mind they are both essential.

I have had a great misfortune; my dear old dog is dead.

She was the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly ever.

Autumn glows upon us like a splendid evening; it is the very sunset of the year.

I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman...with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.

We may admire people for being wise, but we like them best when they are foolish.

I place flowers in the very first rank of simple pleasures; and I have no very good opinion of the hard worldly people who take no delight in them.

There is no running away from a great grief.

On Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other -- also for diction. Her words paint.

I have still the best comforts of life -- books and friendships -- and I trust never to lose my relish for either.

In our present high state of civilization, people are so much alike, that anything at all odd comes on one with the freshness and character of an antique coin among smooth shillings.

The slightest emotion of disinterested kindness that passes through the mind improves and refreshes that mind, producing generous thought and noble feeling, as the sun and rain foster your favourite flowers. Cherish kind wishes, my children; for a time may come when you may be enabled to put them in practice.

Our English people are much addicted to raising idols, and then revenging themselves on their own idolatry by knocking down and demolishing the poor bits of wood and stone that they had worshipped as gods. How many literary reputations have been so treated!