“Nothing can permanently please, which doesn’t contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.”

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.

Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light.

And in today already walks tomorrow.

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

I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.

Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire.

Past dreams of bliss our lives contain, And slight the chords that still retain A heart estranged to joys again,

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power.

Each title a reminder of the stored information and creative thoughts contained therein.

To me exposition always contains tenderness.