Great Throughts Treasury

"I was rear'd/In the great city,pent 'mid cloisters dim...But thou ,my babe,shalt wander like a breez... Of that eternal language,which thy God/Utters,who from eternity doth teach/Himself in all,and all things in himself."

"I think nothing can be added to Milton's definition or rule of poetry,? that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned; that is to say, single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and informing them all with the spirit of the mind."

"I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakespeare!"

"I stood in unimaginable trance and agony that cannot be remembered."

"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."

"If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse."

"If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke? Aye! And what then?"

"I worshipped the Invisible alone."

"If any man obtain that which he merits."

"If it were asked, to what purpose or with what view we should generalize the idea of Life thus broadly, I should not hesitate to reply that, were there no other use conceivable, there would be some advantage in merely destroying an arbitrary assumption in natural philosophy, and in reminding the physiologists that they could not hear the life of metals asserted with a more contemptuous surprise than they themselves incur from the vulgar, when they speak of the Life in mold or mucor. But this is not the case."

"If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that stupendous event, the rise and establishment of Christianity, in comparison with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come? What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Napoleon?"

"If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?"

"Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception."

"Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight."

"If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself."

"In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue."

"In many ways doth the full heart reveal the presence of the love it would conceal."

"In life's noisiest hour?"

"In nature there is nothing melancholy."

"In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission."

"In our life alone does Nature live."

"In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning."

"In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure."

"In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly."

"In selfish forethought of neglect and slight."

"In short, visible surface and power of any kind, much more the power of life, are ideas which the very forms of the human understanding make it impossible to identify."

"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column: In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."

"In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all in-woven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere."

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree : Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round :And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;And here were forests ancient as the hills, enfolding sunny spots of greenery."

"In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective."

"Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it."

"Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style."

"In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."

"In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveler, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance."

"In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope."

"In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends, and admiration fill up the interspace; but the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration."

"In today already walks tomorrow."

"In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock ? the priceless gems and gold ? is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike."

"Is pride that apes humility."

"It flung up momently the sacred river."

"It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit."

"It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers."

"It is a wonderful property of the human mind, that when once a momentum has been given to it in a fresh direction, it pursues the new path with obstinate perseverance, in all conceivable bearings, to its utmost extremes. And by the startling consequences which arise out of these extremes, it is first awakened to its error, and either recalled to some former track, or receives some fresh impulse, which it follows with the same eagerness, and admits to the same monopoly."

"It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. 'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?"

"It is that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith."

"Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt."

"It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say."

"It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine."

"It sounds like stories from the land of spirits - If any may obtain that which he merits - or any merit that which he obtains"

"It was a miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!"