Quotes from Isaac D'Israeli

Their chief residence was Bagdad, where they remained until the eleventh century, an age fatal in Oriental history, from the disasters of which the Princes of the Captivity were not exempt.

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves - the creature of habits and infirmities.

Beware of the man of one book.

The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

Beware of the man of one book. [Lat., Home unius libri, or, cave ab homine unius libri.]

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.

The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

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

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.

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.

All is extremely genteel; and there is almost as much repose as in the golden saloons of the contiguous palaces. At any rate, if there be as much vice, there is as little crime.

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

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

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

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract. Whenever the mind of a writer is saturated with the full inspiration of a great author, a quotation gives completeness to the whole; it seals his feelings with undisputed authority.

Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonize.

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

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.

All this is labour which never meets the eye.... But too open and generous a revelation of the chapter and the page of the original quoted, has often proved detrimental to the legitimate honours of the quoter. They are unfairly appropriated by the next comer; the quoter is never quoted, but the authority he has afforded is produced by his successor with the air of an original research.

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...