Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?
In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
I am in love with this green Earth.
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.
A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.
His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.
Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.
To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.
Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.
Oh stay! oh stay! Joy so seldom weaves a chain Like this to-night, that oh ’t is pain To break its links so soon.
To sigh, yet feel no pain; To weep, yet scarce know why; To sport an hour with Beauty’s chain, Then throw it idly by.
I could never hate anyone I knew.
The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.
Our spirits grow gray before our hairs.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see another mountain in my life.
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school-boy’s holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions.
The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.