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The amplest knowledge has the largest faith. Ignorance is always incredulous. Tell an English cottager that the belfries of Swedish churches are crimson, and his own white steeple furnishes him with a contradiction.

Robert Aris Willmott

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Robert Aris Willmott
Age: 54 †
Born: 1809
Born: January 1
Died: 1863
Died: January 1
Author
Biographer
Religious
Writer
Incredulous
English
Steeples
Ignorance
Furnishes
Knowledge
Swedish
Church
Crimson
Faith
Largest
White
Churches
Tell
Steeple
Always
Contradiction

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Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the window in the landscape it displays. A fine style gives the view of fancy--its figures, its trees, or its palaces,--without a spot.
Robert Aris Willmott
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The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.
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Newton found that a star, examined through a glass tarnished by smoke, was diminished into a speck of light. But no smoke ever breathed so thick a mist as envy or detraction.
Robert Aris Willmott
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The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-traveling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor. The ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise. Odors of distant countries and times steal from the red leaves, the swelling ridges of vellum, and the titles in tarnished gold.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Attention makes the genius all learning, fancy, science and skills depend upon it. Newton traced his discoveries to it. It builds bridges, opens new worlds, heals diseases, carries on the business of the world. Without it taste is useless, and the beauties of literature unobserved.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Many books belong to sunshine, and should be read out of doors. Clover, violets, and hedge roses breathe from their leaves they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn, while the blackbird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Some imitation is involuntary and unconscious.
Robert Aris Willmott
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A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting and magnifying the page.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Talents, to strike the eye of posterity, should be concentrated. Rays, powerless while they are scattered, burn in a point.
Robert Aris Willmott
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We waste the power in impatience which, if, otherwise employed, might remedy the evil.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Criticism must never be sharpened into anatomy. The delicate veins of fancy may be traced, and the rich blood that gives bloom and health to the complexion of thought be resolved into its elements. Stop there. The life of the imagination, as of the body, disappears when we pursue it.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Humor is the pensiveness of wit.
Robert Aris Willmott
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What philosopher of the schoolroom, with the mental dowry of four summers, ever questions the power of the wand that opened the dark eyes of the beautiful princess, or subtracts a single inch from the stride of seven leagues?
Robert Aris Willmott
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The light of genius never sets, but sheds itself upon other faces, in different hues of splendor. Homer glows in the softened beauty of Virgil, and Spenser revives in the decorated learning of Gray.
Robert Aris Willmott
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The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic.
Robert Aris Willmott
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From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.
Robert Aris Willmott
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Education is the apprenticeship of life
Robert Aris Willmott
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A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love.
Robert Aris Willmott
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The fame of a battlefield grows with its years Napoleon storming the Bridge of Lodi, and Wellington surveying the towers of Salamanca, affect us with fainter emotions than Brutus reading in his tent at Philippi, or Richard bearing down with the English chivalry upon the white armies of Saladin.
Robert Aris Willmott
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The advice of a scholar, whose piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is never to be forgotten. Proportion an hour's reflection to an hour's reading, and so dispirit the book into the student.
Robert Aris Willmott