A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.

One has no notion of him [William Cobbett] as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers. . . . He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; “lays waste” a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

This play [ Hamlet ] has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history.

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

No young man believes he shalfever die.

Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.

Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.

A woman’s vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the God of her idolatry.

The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong if we do not feel right.