No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.
There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.
We encourage one another in mediocrity.
Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book.
Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews’s Sermons?
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.
I cannot sit and think; books think for me.
Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar’s robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.
An album is a garden, not for show Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.
I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.
While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.
Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?
To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.
This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.
Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.
A poor relation – is the most irrelevant thing in nature.
Go where glory waits thee! But while fame elates thee, Oh, still remember me!
May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that’s the some on’t.
This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.