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.
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.