The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease,...

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is...

Love turns, with little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.

In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to...

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

Never so sure our rapture to createAs when it touch’d the brink of all we hate.

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators. [“On the Ignorance of the...

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.

We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a littleof Shakespear. [Oct. 16, 1814, The Champion]

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.”[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off...

The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect,...

Rome has been called the “Sacred City”: – might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the...

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.(1778 – 1830)

Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.

The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.

He understands the texture and meaning of the visible universe, and ‘sees into the life of things,’ not by the help of mechanical instruments, but of the improved exercise of his faculties, and an intimate...

The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

A man’s life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To...

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of...

A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

Shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of my mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom, with power, because I have been followed with one cry...

THE rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance,...

Sacrifices are no sacrifices when they are repaid a thousand fold.