Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star, In his steep course? So long he seems to pause, On thy bald awful head, О sovran Blanc!
The last speech, the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity — how awful!
The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.
Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. 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.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye, what then?
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 infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol.
The imagination … that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, — as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches’ pockets.
Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.
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