ISAAC D'ISRAELI

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

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.

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

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.

The wise make proverbs, and fools repeat them.

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.

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

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

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.

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.

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

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

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

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.

[Of political nicknames:] This political artifice of appropriating cant terms, or odious nicknames, could not fail to flourish among a people so perpetually divided by contending interests as ourselves [the English]; every party with us have had their watchword, which has served either to congregate themselves, or to set on the ban-dogs of one faction to worry and tear those of another [party]. We practiced it early, and we find it still prospering.

Politics. The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.

The friends of the court and the advocates of lineal succession, are, by the republican party, branded with the title of tories, which was the name of certain Irish robbers: while the court party in return would find no other revenge that by appropriating to covenanters and the republicans of that class, the name of the Scotch beverage of sour milk, whose virtue they considered so expressive of their disposition and which is called Whig.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are preserved by quotations.