C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Isaac Disraeli
A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.
A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumny, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principle has taken full effect on this state favorite.
A poet is a painter of the soul.
And, after all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.
Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.
Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.
Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.
It does at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.
Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.
Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.
Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.
Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles.
Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius.
The act of contemplation then creates the thing contemplated.
The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, and in all places; and men of genius, in their walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning the eye of the mind inwards, can form an artificial solitude; retired amidst a crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly.
The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.
The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.
The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours; and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves,—the creature of habits and infirmities.
The greater part of our writers,***have become so original, that no one cares to imitate them: and those who never quote in return are seldom quoted.
The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.
The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labor is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.
The self-educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation.
There is a society in the deepest solitude.
Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.
To think and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius—the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.