Literature and Words

There’s glory for you!

They gave it me,—for an un-birthday present.

Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing.

‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice,

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

The true University of these days is a collection of books.

History a distillation of rumour.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Here lies a king, that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit.

Other voices, other rooms.

A great book is like great evil.

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

All poets are mad.

Like watermen, that row one way and look another.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.

A loose, plain, rude writer … I call a spade a spade.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest.

When it was written, God and Robert

There’s a great text in Galatians,

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain.