It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it

Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon of calm: a tranquillity that seem no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose

Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.

People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.

Reserve is the truest expression of respect towards those who are its objects

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect

To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does

Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labours in the evasion of cacophony

Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous ‘gluttonism’ for books.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them

A long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter

It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them

Often one’s dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole

Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewel

Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesi

The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry

Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them

Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration

War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.

The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence

No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import

Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.

For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days

Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities

Ideas! There is no occasion for them; all that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language of representative feelings

Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children – honored as the jewelry of God

The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style

If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the Incommunicable. And if another Sphinx should arise to propose another enigma to man–saying, what burden is that which only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should answer at once: It is the burden of the Incommunicable

Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,’ bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood..

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made

It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London

I stood checked for a moment – awe, not fear, fell upon me – and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.

There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism

The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of god seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination

The burden of the incommunicable

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it

It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety

The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion

Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without

So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical

It is an impressive truth that sometimes in the very lowest forms of duty, less than which would rank a man as a villain, there is, nevertheless the sublimest ascent of self-sacrifice. To do less would class you as an object of eternal scorn, to do so much presumes the grandeur of heroism

No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone

The public is a bad guesser

Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear

Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual

All that is literature seeks to communicate power

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state

There is first the literature of KNOWLEDGE, and secondly, the literature of POWER. The function of the first is – to teach; the function of the second is – to move