1. “Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.”
2. "Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune."
3. “Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.”
4. "If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."
5. “It is better to be able neither to read or write than to be able to do nothing else.”
6. ”Love at first sight is only realizing an imagination that has always haunted us; or meeting with a face, a figure, or cast of expression in perfection that we have seen and admired in a less degree or in less favorable circumstances a hundred times before.”
7. "Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses center in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe, so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without possibility of its ever being otherwise."
8. “Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when you were not: that gives us no concern. Why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? To die is only to be as we were before we were born.”
9. “Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.”
10. “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.”
11. “Rules and models destroy genius and art.”
12. “[Science is] the desire to know causes.”
13. “The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
14. “The more we do, the more we can do.”
15. ”The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.”
16. “There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.”
17. “The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”
18. “We are not hypocrites in our sleep.”
19. “When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.”
20. “Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.”
21. ”Words are the only things that last forever.”
