Top 50 Isaac D'Israeli Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

3. “There is a society in the deepest solitude.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

4. “Candour is the brightest gem of criticism.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

6. “A poet is a painter of the soul.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

7. “There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “To bend and prostrate oneself to express sentiments of respect, appears to be a natural motion.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

9. “Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...”

— Isaac D'Israeli

10. “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.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

12. “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

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

14. “Time the great destroyer of other men’s happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

15. “The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

16. “A circle may be small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

17. “The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

19. “The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, and in all places, and men of genius, in their walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning the eye of the the mind upwards, can form an artificial solitude; retired amidst a crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

20. “Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, enthusiasm is the true part of genius.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

21. “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

22. “An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

23. “Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

24. “Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

26. “Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

27. “Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

28. “A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

31. “A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

32. “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.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

33. “The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

34. “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.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

36. “It is fortunate that Literature is in no ways injured by the follies of Collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

37. “Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords whose tones we are about to harmonize.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

38. “It does not 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

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

— Isaac D'Israeli

40. “One may quote till one compiles.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

41. “Style! style! why, all writers will tell you that it is the very thing which can least of all be changed. A man’s style is nearly as much a part of him as his physiognomy, his figure, the throbbing of this pulse, – in short, as any part of his being is at least subjected to the action of the will.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

42. “But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

43. “Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

44. “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.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

45. “Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

46. “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

47. “Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

48. “The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

49. “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.”

— Isaac D'Israeli

50. “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