Miscellanists are the most popular writers among every people; for it is they who form a communication between the learned and the unlearned, and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great divisions of the public.
Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonize.
A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.
One may quote till one compiles.
The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.
The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.
Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.
A circle may be small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one.
The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.
Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners.
Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.
Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.
It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.
Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...