Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The public is a bad guesser.
The burden of the incommunicable.
Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.
All that is literature seeks to communicate power
Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.
All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.
Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!
Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.
A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.
The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
Reserve is the truest expression of respect towards those who are its objects.
Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.
Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.
It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.
It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.
No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.
There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.
Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.
Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it 'cannot be remembered'; itself, being a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos.
It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.
Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.
Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.
There is first the literature of KNOWLEDGE, and secondly, the literature of POWER. The function of the first is -- to teach; the function of the second is -- to move.
So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.
Allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents for missing.
The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of god seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.
Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God.
Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.