An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age.
Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.
To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius-the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.
The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves – the creature of habits and infirmities.
Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.
Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.
The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.
It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.
The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.
Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, enthusiasm is the true part of genius.
The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.
There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.
Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.
If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.
The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.
There is a society in the deepest solitude.
It is fortunate that Literature is in no ways injured by the follies of Collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good.
To bend and prostrate oneself to express sentiments of respect, appears to be a natural motion.
Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius.