Sentiment.—Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?—Emerson.
Separation.—Indifferent souls never part. Impassioned souls part, and return to one another, because they can do no better.—Madame Swetchine.
Shakespeare.—There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare.—Heinrich Heine.
Far from fearing, as an inferior artist would have done, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the divine, the wildest and most fantastic comedy with the loftiest and gravest tragedy, Shakespeare not only made such apparently discordant elements mutually heighten and complete the general effect which he contemplated, but in so doing teaches us that, in human life, the sublime and ridiculous are always side by side, and that the source of laughter is placed close by the fountain of tears.—T. B. Shaw.
Shakespeare is a great psychologist, and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays.—Goethe.
In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.—Coleridge.
No man is too busy to read Shakespeare.—Charles Buxton.
Shakespeare's personages live and move as if they had just come from the hand of God, with a life that, though manifold, is one, and, though complex, is harmonious.—Mazzini.
Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child.—Milton.
And rival all but Shakespeare's name below.—Campbell.