Literature and Words

Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging … Shakespeare wanted art.

How far thou didst our Lyly outshine,

Reader, look

This figure that thou here seest put,

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.

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.

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.

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.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader.

The father of English criticism.

Language is the dress of thought.

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

Lexicographer. A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million … but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

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.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

The proper study of mankind is books.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.