143 quotes
Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.
Milton', The Edinburgh Review (1825)
* * * A man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
The voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve.
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilisation, or both.
That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1831)
A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.
Southey's Colloquies on Society', The Edinburgh Review (1830)
Everybody's business is nobody's business.
The dust and silence of the upper shelf.
Milton', The Edinburgh Review (1825)
A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth.
History of England (1849)
In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
"Sidney Godolphin," said Charles (II), "is never in the way and never out of the way."
He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
Moore's Life of Lord Byron', The Edinburgh Review (1830)
Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.
It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human nature, and to learn to look without wonder or disgust on the weaknesses which are found in the strongest minds.
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities.
The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.
A system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
I would not give up the keys to the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn scarcity into a famine.