quotes from classic
/ page 920 of 1205 /I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.
more quotes from Heinrich Heine
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.
more quotes from William Ernest Henley
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, a box where sweets compacted lie.
more quotes from George Herbert
A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.
more quotes from George Herbert
The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition.
more quotes from George Herbert
The buyer needs a hundred eyes, the seller not one.
more quotes from George Herbert
He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven.
more quotes from George Herbert
Many kiss the hand they wish cut off.
more quotes from George Herbert
One father is enough to govern one hundred sons, but not a hundred sons one father.
more quotes from George Herbert
Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy.
more quotes from George Herbert
Better never begin than never make an end.
more quotes from George Herbert
