He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.
How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?
No work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itself,--the most unwholesome of food.
Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.
Who first invented work, and bound the free And holiday-rejoicing spirit down . . . . To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood? . . . . Sabbathless Satan!
Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
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.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.
You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.
My theory is to enjoy life, but my practice is against it.
No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference.
He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.
It is good to have friends at court.
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.
Be not frightened at the hard words "imposition," "imposture;" give and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have, unawares, entertained angels.
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?
The true poet dreams being awake.
The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.
So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men.
Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.
Man is a gaming animal.
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