George Saintsbury

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

Historians may lie, but History cannot.

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious …

[It] is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.

In the sect – fairly large and yet unusually choice – of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels.