To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
The English Bible – a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
I don’t mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
In Plato’s opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon’s opinion, philosophy was made for man.