George Henry Lewes
Insight is the first condition of Art.Collection: Art
The only cure for grief is action.Collection: Sympathy
Sincerity is moral truth.Collection: Truth
Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.Collection: Brainy
Science is the systematic classification of experience.Collection: Science
Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.Collection: Imagination
Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.Collection: Independence
Science is not addressed to poets.Collection: Science
Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.Collection: Imagination
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.Collection: Beauty
Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength.Collection: Strength
Speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent.
The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.
We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.
When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent.
Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less difficult than is commonly supposed.
In all sincere speech there is power, not necessarily great power, but as much as the speaker is capable of.
Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.
No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.
Endeavour to be faithful, and if there is any beauty in your thought, your style will be beautiful; if there is any real emotion to express, the expression will be moving.
Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them.
All great authors are seers.
If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.
The delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected.
The public can only be really moved by what is genuine.
Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families.
Books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance, and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and their art.
Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.
The superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised.
Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.
All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.
Books have become our dearest companions, yielding exquisite delights and inspiring lofty aims.
The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.
As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.
In complex trains of thought signs are indispensable.
A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.
Good writers are of necessity rare.
All good Literature rests primarily on insight.
It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.Collection: Smart
Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.Collection: Spontaneity
The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.Collection: Real
Character is built out of circumstances. From exactly the same materials, one man builds palaces, while another builds hovels.Collection: Character
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.Collection: Exercise
Science as we now understand the word is of later birth. If its germinal origin may be traced to the early period when Observation, Induction, and Deduction were first employed, its birth must be referred to that comparatively recent period when the mind, rejecting the primitive tendency to seek in supernatural agencies for an explanation of all external phenomena, endeavoured, by a systematic investigation of the phenomena themselves to discover their invariable order and connection.Collection: Agency
The air is crowded with birds -- beautiful, tender, intelligent birds -- to whom life is a song.Collection: Beautiful
Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crotchet-monger and an eccentric.Collection: Beautiful
The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.Collection: Science
The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.Collection: Art