This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.
Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.
Boswell is the first of biographers.
The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
Complete self-devotion is woman’s part.
The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.
The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.
We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.
No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.
In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.
Power, safely defied, touches its downfall.
A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.
The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.
Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, – endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.
If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.
In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.
The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.