Others

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

They are forced plants, raised in a hot-bed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all.

Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.

Johnson had said that he could repeat a complete chapter of ‘The Natural History of Iceland’, from the Danish of Horrebow, the whole of which was exactly thus:—‘ CHAP. Lxxii. Concerning snakes. There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.’

BOSWELL : Sir, what is poetry?

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Truth, Sir, is a cow, that will yield such people [sceptics] no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.

He [the poet] must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.

I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader.

An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

Language is the dress of thought.

The father of English criticism.

Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.