After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron..

A work, however, should be judged by its design and its execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the critic,….

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers..

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer ….

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract. Whenever the….

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 amu….

Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmo….

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 stat….

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins..

Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times..

It is generally supposed that where there is no QUOTATION, there will be found most originality; and as people like to lay out their money according ….

An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age..

A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumnity, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principal has taken ful….

The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age..

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing..

A circle may be small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one..

The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire..

Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind..

A poet is a painter of the soul..

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor..

Bayle, when writing on "Comets," discovered this; for having collected many things applicable to his work, as they stood quoted in some modern writer….