The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, …

He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not ha…

Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity - an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four,…

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.