Isaac D'Israeli Quotes (1766-1848)

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

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

“After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.”

“After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.”

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

“And, 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.”

“It does at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.”

“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.”

“A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumny, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principle has taken full effect on this state favorite.”

“Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners.”

“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.”

“Miscellanists are the most popular writers among every people; for it is they who form a communication between the learned and the unlearned, and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great divisions of the public.”

“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.”

“An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life, constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age; but of late, while the arts of assembling in large societies have been practised, varied by all forms, and pushed on to all excesses.”

“Aristotle having declaimed irreverently of the gods, and dreading the fate of Socrates, wished to retire from Athens. In a beautiful manner he pointed out his successor. There were two rivals in his schools: Menedemus the Rhodian, and Theophrastus of Lesbos. Alluding delicately to his own critical situation, he told his assembled scholars that the wine he was accustomed to drink was injurious to him, and he desired them to bring the wines of Rhodes and Lesbos. He tasted both, and declared they both did honour to their soil, each being excellent, though differing in their quality;—the Rhodian wine is the strongest, but the Lesbian is the sweetest, and that he himself preferred it. Thus his ingenuity designated his favourite Theophrastus, the author of the "Characters," for his successor.”