“Silence does not always mark wisdom.”

How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, “the friend of God,” Abraham was that man.

Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame.

The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.

In many ways doth the full heart reveal The presence of the love it would conceal.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined man” is itself a vocation.

Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes,

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius – the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:–for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.

I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t.

As long as the marks are related to one another, there is unity. Unity in the work itself depends on unity of the artist’s vision.

Wisdom’s daughter walks alone, The mark of Athena burns through Rome.

The scale and grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.

Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.

The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has touched me deeply to see so many thousands of families, neighbors and friends celebrating together in such a happy atmosphere.