“How inimitably graceful children are in general-before they learn to dance.”

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

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.

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime.

There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.

Students, when you want to say something, think about it three times before you say it. Speak only if your words will benefit yourselves and others. Do not speak if it brings no benefit.

A farmer’s horse is never lame, never unfit to go. Never throws out curbs, never breaks down before or behind.

Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.

We are deliberately putting a world order before our loyalty to our own country.

One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.