Quotes from Isaac D'Israeli

The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire.

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.

Happy the man when he has not the defects of his qualities.

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

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.

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius.

A poet is a painter of the soul.

The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.

Certain it is that their power increased always in an exact proportion to the weakness of the Caliphate, and, without doubt, in some of the most distracted periods of the Arabian rule, the Hebrew Princes rose into some degree of local and temporary importance.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

To bend and prostrate oneself to express sentiments of respect, appears to be a natural motion.

Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.

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.

There is a society in the deepest solitude.

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.

Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.

Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.

The wise make proverbs, and fools repeat them.

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

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

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius.