Isaac D'Israeli Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

Isaac D'Israeli
Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Isaac D'Israeli
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.

Isaac D'Israeli
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.

Isaac D'Israeli
Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles.

Isaac D'Israeli
It is generally supposed that where there is no Quotation, there will be found most originality.

Isaac D'Israeli
Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.

Isaac D'Israeli
The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.

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

Isaac D'Israeli
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

Isaac D'Israeli
Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

Isaac D'Israeli
To bend and prostrate oneself to express sentiments of respect, appears to be a natural motion.

Isaac D'Israeli
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.

Isaac D'Israeli
The negroes are lovers of ludicrous actions, and hence all their ceremonies seem farcical.

Isaac D'Israeli
Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the imagination to be without imagination, nor did they venture to teach how to invent invention.

Isaac D'Israeli
A preface being the porch, or the entrance to a book, should be perfectly beautiful. The elegance of a porch announces the splendor of an edifice.

Isaac D'Israeli
If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

Isaac D'Israeli
After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.

Isaac D'Israeli
The three pillars of learning; seeing much, suffering much, and studying much.

Isaac D'Israeli
There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

Isaac D'Israeli
The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.

Isaac D'Israeli
An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age

Isaac D'Israeli
Whatever is felicitously expressed risks being worse expressed: it is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

Isaac D'Israeli