“Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!”

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.