The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.
An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.
Taste is something quite different from fashion, superior to fashion.
When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and planted it, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing, but it may spread into a prodigious timber.
Presently, we were aware of an odour gradually coming towards us, something musky, fiery, savoury, mysterious, - a hot drowsy smell, that lulls the senses, and yet enflames them, - the truffles were coming.
If fun is good, truth is still better, and love best of all.
True love is better than glory.
If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbor?
Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard... 'Tis the living up to it that's difficult.
If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more.
Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.
We are most of us very lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God.
How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?
To describe love-making is immoral and immodest; you know it is. To describe it as it really is, or would appear to you and me as lookers-on, would be to describe the most dreary farce, to chronicle the most tautological twaddle. To take note of sighs, hand-squeezes, looks at the moon, and so forth--does this business become our dignity as historians? Come away from those foolish young people--they don't want us; and dreary as their farce is, and tautological as their twaddle, you may be sure it amuses them, and that they are happy enough without us.
Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.
Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men's faces that is honored wherever presented. You cannot help trusting such men. Their very presence gives confidence. There is promise to pay in their faces which gives confidence and you prefer it to another man's endorsement. Character is credit.
If you had told Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have been pleased, witch as she was.
What woman, however old, has not the bridal-favours and raiment stowed away, and packed in lavender, in the inmost cupboards of her heart?
As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!
What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy's tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.
Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
Our measure of rewards and punishments is most partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly worldly; and we wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent paltry verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rod to measure heaven immeasurable.
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