Most of the ideas behind these quotations have been superseded or upgraded in the two centuries since they were published. Coleridge and Wordsworth argued incessantly with Schiller and Goethe, Lamb and Carlyle about the Greeks, gravity, Descartes, Ireland, Shakespeare, Corn Laws, God and Kant. Some of his theses on ‘polar logic’, ‘fancy or imagination’ and ‘reason and understanding’ were only re-addressed in the 1930s.
  I have composed this list like others on my website to encourage investigation of a known yet obscure, démodé genius from the currently unfashionable pre-Victorian era. These are the shortest and wittiest bits.

• Socrates seems to have been continually oscillating between the good and the useful.
• It amuses me to hear men impute misfortunes to fate, luck or destiny; whilst their successes or good fortune they ascribe to their own sagacity, cleverness or penetration?
• The man’s desire is for the woman; the woman’s desire is for the desire of the man.
• (John) Brown’s and (Charles) Darwin’s theories are both ingenious; but the first will not account for sleep, and the last will not account for death: considerable defects, you must allow.
• Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.
• Horne Took was a ready-witted man. He had that clearness which is founded on shallowness.
• The stock-jobbing and moneyed interest is so strong in this country, that it has more than once prevailed in our foreign councils over national honour and national justice.
• Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.
• The English affect stimulant nourishment – beef and beer; the French, excitants, irritants – nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne; the Austrians, sedatives – hyoscyamus; the Russians, narcotics – opium, tobacco and beng.
• I can never digest the loss of most of Origen’s works: he seems to have been the only very great scholar and genius amongst the early fathers. His Heptaglott Bible containing the Hebrew words written in Greek characters would have fixed the sounds as known at that time.
• The entire tendency of the modern or Malthusian political economy is to denationalize – making love of our country a foolish superstition. It would readily dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel to run a steam-engine!
• We value the Scotch without liking them and we like the Irish without over-valuing them.
• ‘Imagination’ is a primary action; the living power of human perception; a repetition of the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. ‘Fancy’ deals with fixities and definites; is merely a mode of memory emancipated from space and time and modified by the empirical phenomenon of the will. They are different in kind, not degree.
• A rock is alive, living very slowly.
• Bellarmine makes sweating and crowding one of the torments of Hell, which Lessius affirms is a Dutch mile in diameter. But Ribera, grounding his map on the Apocalypse, makes it two hundred Italian miles. Lessius was a protestant, for whom, of course, a smaller Hell would suffice.
• ‘Objective’ means nothing more than ‘intersubjectively testable’.
• The Malthusian doctrine. The 100,000 unemployed factory operatives are told; ‘You came into a world that cannot sustain you. I cannot afford you relief. You must starve.’ Their answer would be: ‘You disclaim all connection with me. I have no duties towards you and this pistol shall put me in possession of your wealth. You may leave a law which shall hang me, but what man who sees assured starvation ever feared hanging?’ And in a few years we shall either be governed by an aristocracy, or, more likely, a contemptible democratical oligarchy of glib economists.
• The most happy marriage I can imagine would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
• Music converses with the life of my mind, as if it were the mind of my life.
• Commerce has enriched thousands, it has been the cause of the spread of knowledge and science; but has it added one particle of happiness or of moral improvement? Has it given us a truer insight into our duties, or tended to revive and sustain in us the better feelings of our nature? No!
• All real history is history of thought.