Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.
To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.
He prayeth best who loveth best.
As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.
I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.
Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.
The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected.
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.
Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.
When thieves come, I bark; when gallants, I am still – So perform both my master’s and mistress’s will.
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.
When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.
The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.
Nothing can permanently please, which doesn’t contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.
The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.
Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.
Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.
Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed!
Acquaintance many, and conquaintance few, But for inquaintance I know only two – The friend I’ve wept and the maid I woo.