This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen pence a day; but for fantasy, planets and solar systems, will not suffice.
We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.
The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.
The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.
He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.
To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.
A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,-a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.
In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.
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