Literature and Words

The father of English criticism.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

I always say, keep a diary and some day it’ll keep you.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Eloquence is feeling pouring itself to other minds, courting their sympathy.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech.

A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

A letter is a soliloquy, but a letter with a postscript is a conversation.

It seems to me that many fall into it even against their will, and fancy they are discussing, when they are merely debating, because they cannot distinguish the meanings of a term, in their investigation of any question, but carry on their opposition to what is stated, by attacking the mere words, employing the art of debate, and not that of philosophical discussion.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Fiction is the higher autobiography.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

A good indignation makes an excellent speech.