Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.
Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison.
Ancestral voices prophesying war.
The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulders to mount on.
An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.
There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.
Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.
Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
Blest hour! It was a luxury – to be!
I ago’s soliloquy – the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity – how awful it is!
The more sparingly we make use of nonsense, the better.
I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.
Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.
We ne’er can be Made happy by compulsion.
Never pursue literature as a trade.
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.
And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all?
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
Farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.
During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.