“The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.”

The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it – low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion – and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national.

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

Of no agenor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

Blest hour! It was a luxury–to be!

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

There is one art of which people should be masters – the art of reflection.

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

We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,–the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts.

Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.

Learning (Shakespeare’s plays) …in school was a bit of a bore.

I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I’ve stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words.

There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare’s.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

It’s almost as important as Shakespeare’s to be or not to be which deals with death.