The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
Time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content--doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages.
New Year's Day is every man's birthday.
I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.
Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.
Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return.
In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
Dr Parr...asked him, how he had acquired his power of smoking at such a rate? Lamb replied, 'I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.'
I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.
I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.
It is good to love the unknown.
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature?but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind.
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.
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.
I have something more to do than to feel.
Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.
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.
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
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.
Who has not felt how sadly sweet The dream of home, the dream of home, Steals o'er the heart, too soon to fleet, When far o'er sea or land we roam?
Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.
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