Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
Samuel Johnson Quotes
The true effect of genuine politeness seems to be rather ease than pleasure… Though it be the privilege of a very small number to ravish and to charm, every man may hope by rules and caution not to give pain, and may, therefore, by the help of good breeding, enjoy the kindness of mankind, though […]
I have ever since (his wife’s death) seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on the world to which I have little relation.
Whatever has various respects, must have various appearances of good and evil, beauty or deformity; thus, the gardener tears up as a weed, the plant which the physician gathers as a medicine; and “a general,” says Sir Kenelm Digby, “will look with pleasure over a plain, as a fit place on which the fate of […]
The characteristick quality of his poem is sublimity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but his natural port is gigantick loftiness. He can please when pleasure is required, but it is his peculiar power to astonish.
Knowledge of the subject is to the poet what durable materials are to the architect.
To tell of disappointment and misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of the poets.
Then, Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Thomson had a true poetical genius, the power of viewing every thing in a poetical light. His fault is such a cloud of words sometimes, that the sense can hardly peep through. Shiels, who compiled ‘Cibber’s Lives of the Poets,’ was one day sitting with me. I took down Thomson, and read aloud a large […]
