1. “Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into, the mind.”
2. “A dwarf sees father than a giant when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.”
3. “All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.”
4. “All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.”
5. “All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.”
6. “A man of maxims only, is like a cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.”
7. “And he, with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meaning in the forms of Nature!”
8. “And so, his senses gradually wrapt
In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds,
And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark;
That singest like an angel in the clouds.”
9. “And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.”
10. “And what if all of animated nature,
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each, and God of all?”
11. “A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.”
12. “A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.”
13. “Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.”
14. ”Common-sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
15. "Good and bad men are less than they seem."
16. “He knows well the evening star, and once when he awoke, in a most distressful mood (some inward pain had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream), I hurried with him to our orchard plot, and he beheld the moon, and hushed at once. Suspends his sobs and laughs most silently. While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, did glitter in the yellow moonbeam.”
17. “Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality's dark dream!”
18. “Her gentle limbs did she undress,
And lay down in her loveliness.”
19. "He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope."
20. “He saw a lawyer killing a viper
On a dunghill hard, by his own stable
And the devil smiled, for it put him in mind
Of Cain and his brother, Abel.”
21. “If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.”
22. ”I have heard of reasons manifold
Why love must needs be blind,
But this the best of all I hold,-
His eyes are in his mind...
23. "I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance."
24. “I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”
25. “In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
26. “It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.”
27. “It was a miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”
28. “Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
29. “Life is but thought.
30. “My eyes make pictures, when they are shut.”
31. “No one does anything from a single motive.”
32. “Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.”
33. “Only the wise possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.”
34. “Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.”
35. ”Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.”
36. "People of humor are always in some degree people of genius."
37. “Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.”
38. “Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.”
39. “Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.”
40. ”Prose = words in their best order;
Poetry = the best words in the best order.”
41. “No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humour.”
42. "No one does anything from a single motive."
43. “No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.”
44. “Often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks tomorrow.”
45. "Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love."
46. “Readers may be divided into four classes:
1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in
nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to
get through a book for the sake of getting through the
time.
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they
read.
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit
by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.”
47. “Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.”
48. “Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.”
49. “Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.”
50. “Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.”
51. "The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions -- the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimal of pleasurable and genial feeling."
52. “The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pabbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths,-all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”
53. “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”
54. “There are three classes of elderly women;
first, that dear old soul;
second, that old woman;
third, that old witch.”
55. "The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them."
56. “Those who have been led...by...the constant testimony of [only] their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess — They contemplate nothing but parts — and all parts are necessarily little — and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things.”
57. “To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.”
58. "Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."
59. "What comes from the heart, goes to the heart."
60. “What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?”
61. “Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more.”
62. “Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.”
63. “Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”
64. “Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.”
