Top 76 Quotes & Sayings by Isaac D'Israeli - Page 2

It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.

Style! style! why, all writers will tell you that it is the very thing which can least of all be changed. A man's style is nearly as much a part of him as his physiognomy, his figure, the throbbing of this pulse,--in short, as any part of his being is at least subjected to the action of the will.

There is such a thing as literary fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles. The ancient lawyers used to quote at the bar till they had stagnated their own cause.

Candour is the brightest gem of criticism.

A work, however, should be judged by its design and its execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the critic, rather than the author.

Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.

Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.

An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age.

Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, enthusiasm is the true part of genius.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius-the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.