Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed!
I have heard of reasons manifold Why Love must needs be blind, But this the best of all I hold,- His eyes are in his mind.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks / Had I from old and young! / Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung.
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation.
The fair breeze blew, The white foam flew, And the forrow followed free. We were the first to ever burst into the silent sea.
An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.
I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.
Those who best know human nature will acknowledge most fully what a strength light hearted nonsense give to a hard working man
But metre itself implies a passion , i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.
Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead.
Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
O it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please.
I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.
There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.
The genius of Coleridge is like a sunken treasure ship, and Coleridge a diver too timid and lazy to bring its riches to the surface.
A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.
We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.
Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils.
How well he fell asleepl Like some proud river, widening toward the sea; Calmly and grandly, silently and deep, Life joined eternity.
The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark.
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.
Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases, which he does not choose to acknowledge openly with his own sign manual.
That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.
It would not be correct to say that every moral obligation involves a legal duty; but every legal duty is founded on a moral obligation.
Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes.
Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause-a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence.
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!
Wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too.
The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.
The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.
The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.
A Falsehood is, in one sense, a dead thing; but too often it moves about, galvanized by self-will, and pushes the living out of their seats.
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,Reality's dark dream!I turn from you, and listen to the wind,Which long has raved unnoticed.
The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.
It [is] very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.
Moral obligation is to me so very strong a Stimulant, that in 9 cases out of ten it acts as a Narcotic. The Blow that should rouse, stuns me.
The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.
The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.
Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight.
When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.
He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother Abel.