“The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right.”

“We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.”

“Never so sure our rapture to createAs when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.”

“The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman is this: The one thinks everything right that is French, while the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.”

“Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.”

“In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is 'the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, – seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy – mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; – have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.”

“Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.”