Table-Talk quotes

In writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature.

You sit down to your task, and are happy. From the moment that you take up the pencil, and look Nature in the face, you are at peace with your own heart.

You try to set down what you see—find out your error, and correct it. You need not play tricks, or purposely mistake: with all your pains, you are still far short of the mark.

Patience grows out of the endless pursuit, and turns it into a luxury.

A streak in a flower, a wrinkle in a leaf, a tinge in a cloud, a stain in an old wall or ruin grey, are seized with avidity as the spolia opima of this sort of mental warfare, and furnish out labour for another half-day.

so that by the time they appear in a tangible shape, and one can con them over with a conscious, sidelong glance to the public approbation, they have lost their gloss and relish, and become “more tedious than a twice-told tale.”

For a person to read his own works over with any great delight, he ought first to forget that he ever wrote them.

Familiarity naturally breeds contempt. It is, in fact, like poring fondly over a piece of blank paper; from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning to the mind—are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an interest and property in them.

For a person to read his own works over with any great delight, he ought first to forget that he ever wrote them.

Familiarity naturally breeds contempt.

It is, in fact, like poring fondly over a piece of blank paper; from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning to the mind—are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an interest and property in them.

he started up with the greatest delight, and said, “That is the effect I intended to produce, but thought I had failed.”

Wilson was neglected; and, by degrees, neglected his art to apply himself to brandy.

His hand became unsteady, so that it was only by repeated attempts that he could reach the place or produce the effect he aimed at;

they gain more than they lose in the mechanical transformation. One is never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you knew already, but what you have just discovered.

In the former case you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names into things.

There is a continual creation out of nothing going on. With every stroke of the brush a new field of inquiry is laid open; new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them.

… surprise, to think how much pains were thrown away to little purpose—yet not altogether in vain if it taught me to see good in everything, and to know that there is nothing vulgar in Nature seen with the eye of science or of true art.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.

Be this as it may, I spared no pains to do my best. If art was long, I thought that life was so too at that moment. I got in the general effect the first day;

… cabbage, to hit a mark, to move a shuttle, to work a pattern—in a word, to attempt to produce any effect, and to succeed, has something in it that gratifies the love of power, and carries off the restless activity of the mind of man.

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame; and painting combines them both incessantly. The hand is furnished a practical test of the correctness of the eye;

I walked out in the afternoon, and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again.

Oh for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come over again!

I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand intervening years very contentedly!—The picture is left: the table, the chair, the window where I learned to construe Livy, the chapel where my father preached, remain where they were;

but it is he only who does this, who follows them into all their force and matchless race, that does or can feel their full value.

Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.

No one but the artist who has studied nature and contended with the difficulties of art, can be aware of the beauties, or intoxicated with a passion for painting.

The refinements not only of execution but of truth and nature are inaccessible to unpractised eyes. The exquisite gradations in a sky of Claude’s are not perceived by such persons, and consequently the harmony cannot be felt.

Where there is no conscious apprehension, there can be no conscious pleasure.

Wonder at the first sights of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us to existence.

Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or miserable?

Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been one or the other?

… mystic voice breathe into me my former being, and enable me to bear the thing I am!—The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.

The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view; the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest.

What is it in fact that we recur to oftenest? What subjects do we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future, but the well-stored past.

… set aside the necessity of immediate action, or to baffle all attempts to defeat it, it gives us little more disturbance or emotion than if it had already taken place, or were something to happen in another state of being, or to an indifferent person.

Criminals are observed to grow more anxious as their trial approaches; but after their sentence is passed, they become tolerably resigned, and generally sleep sound the night before its execution.

It in some measure confirms this theory, that men attach more or less importance to past and future events according as they are more or less engaged in action and the busy scenes of life.

To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated desires or forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he is now dead.

The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it.

It is neither the first nor last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two—not our exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think while there—that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it.

But this is not a fair view of the case.

A man’s life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle

; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains.

We make up our minds to some one thing, and if we cannot have that, will have nothing. We are wedded to opinion, to fancy, to prejudice; which destroys the soundness of our judgments, and the serenity and buoyancy of our feelings.

The chain of habit coils itself round the heart, like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

It grows rigid and callous; and for the softness and elasticity of childhood, full of proud flesh and obstinate tumours. The violence and perversity of our passions come in more and more to overlay our natural sensibility and well-grounded affections;

The violence and perversity of our passions come in more and more to overlay our natural sensibility and well-grounded affections; and we screw ourselves up to aim only at those things which are neither desirable nor practicable.

Thus life passes away in the feverish irritation of pursuit and the certainty of disappointment.

By degrees, nothing but this morbid state of feeling satisfies us: and all common pleasures and cheap amusements are sacrificed to the demon of ambition, avarice, or dissipation. The machine is overwrought:

The machine is overwrought: the parching heat of the veins dries up and withers the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy; and any pause, any release from the rack of ecstasy on which we are stretched, seems more insupportable than the pangs which we endure.

We are suspended between tormenting desires and the horrors of ennui.

The impulse of the will, like the wheels of a carriage going down hill, becomes too strong for the driver, Reason, and cannot be stopped nor kept within bounds. Some idea, some fancy, takes possession of the brain;

He used to say that he could go on retouching a picture forever, as long as it stood on his easel; but as soon as it was once fairly out of the house, he never wished to see it again.

An ingenious artist of our own time has been heard to declare, that if ever the Devil got him into his clutches, he would set him to copy his own pictures.

Thus secure, self-complacent retrospect to what is done is nothing, while the anxious, uneasy looking forward to what is to come is everything. We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress;

Thus secure, self-complacent retrospect to what is done is nothing, while the anxious, uneasy looking forward to what is to come is everything.

We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of being!

If certain effects did not regularly arise out of certain causes in mind as well as matter, there could be no rule given for them: nature does not follow the rule, but suggests it.

Reason is the interpreter and critic of nature and genius, not their lawgiver and judge.

He must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding, or who does not feel and know much more than he can give a reason for.

The criticism exercised by reason, then, on common sense may be as severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as it is severe.

Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy or bigoted prejudice.

It is systematic, ostentatious in error, closes up the avenues of knowledge, and “shuts the gates of wisdom on mankind.” It is not enough to show that there is no reason for a thing that we do not see the reason of it:

His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from the exact point of view in which others would see it.

He was the Proteus of human intellect.

Genius in ordinary is a more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing else:

he looks at home into himself, and is “content with riches fineless.” He would in the other case be “poor as winter,” if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to.

He is the greatest, that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because he is the greatest egotist.

He is “self-involved, not dark.” He sits in the centre of his own being, and there “enjoys bright day.” He does not waste a thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively and wholly to himself is foreign to his views.

but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton’s being able to multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied 90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would have been equally useless toil and trouble.

He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new ore.

Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the discovery of new and valuable truth.

He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new ore.

Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself.

It is not singularity or affectation, but the discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the whole meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to some things; shortsightedness to others.

on the contrary, his being able to do so many other things well would probably interfere with and encumber him in the execution of the only thing that others cannot do as well as he, and so far be a drawback and a disadvantage.

More people, in fact, fail from a multiplicity of talents and pretensions than from an absolute poverty of resources.

I have given instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps Shakespeare’s tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had never written comedies at all; and in that case his comedies might well have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret.

We do not, on any rational scheme of criticism, inquire into the variety of a man’s excellences, or the number of his works, or his facility of production. Venice Preserved is sufficient for Otway’s fame.

I hate all those nonsensical stories about Lope de Vega and his writing a play in a morning before breakfast. He had time enough to do it after.

If a man leaves behind him any work which is a model in its kind, we have no right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or how long he was about it.

Why does Mr. Kean play all those harlequin tricks of singing, dancing, fencing, etc.? They say, “It is for his benefit.” It is not for his reputation. Garrick indeed shone equally in comedy and tragedy. But he was first, not second-rate in both.

There is not a greater impertinence than to ask, if a man is clever out of his profession.

I have heard of people trying to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons. I would as soon try to entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an argument. Good nature and common sense are required from all people;

Garrick indeed shone equally in comedy and tragedy. But he was first, not second-rate in both. There is not a greater impertinence than to ask, if a man is clever out of his profession. I have heard of people trying to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons.

I would as soon try to entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an argument.

Good nature and common sense are required from all people; but one proud distinction is enough for anyone individual to possess or to aspire to.

People have about as substantial an idea of Cobbett as they have of Cribb.

His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he “fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle.”

People have about as substantial an idea of Cobbett as they have of Cribb. His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable.

One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist

; his style stuns his readers, and he “fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle.” He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; “lays waste” a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself.

Paine in a few short sentences seems by his peremptory manner “to clear it from all controversy, past, present, and to come.”

Paine takes a bird’s-eye view of things. Cobbett sticks close to them, inspects the component parts, and keeps fast hold of the smallest advantages they afford him.

Or, if I might here be indulged in a pastoral allusion, Paine tries to enclose his ideas in a fold for security and repose; Cobbett lets his pour out upon the plain like a flock of sheep to feed and batten.

While it is established, he presses hard against it, because it presses upon him, at least in imagination. Let it crumble under his grasp, and the motive to resistance is gone. He then requires some other grievance to set his face against.

His principle is repulsion, his nature contradiction: he is made up of mere antipathies, an Ishmaelite indeed without a fellow.

He is always playing at hunt-the-slipper in politics. He turns round upon whoever is next him.

But he gives himself “ample scope and verge enough.” He takes both sides of a question, and maintains one as sturdily as the other. If nobody else can argue against him, he is a very good match for himself.

He writes better in favour of Reform than anybody else; he used to write better against it.

Wherever he is, there is the tug of war, the weight of the argument, the strength of abuse.

This is one cause of the clearness and force of his writings. An argument does not stop to stagnate and muddle in his brain, but passes at once to his paper.

His ideas are served up, like pancakes, hot and hot.

Fresh theories give him fresh courage. He is like a young and lusty bridegroom that divorces a favourite speculation every morning, and marries a new one every night. He is not wedded to his notions, not he. He has not one Mrs.

An argument does not stop to stagnate and muddle in his brain, but passes at once to his paper. His ideas are served up, like pancakes, hot and hot. Fresh theories give him fresh courage.

He is like a young and lusty bridegroom that divorces a favourite speculation every morning, and marries a new one every night.

He is not wedded to his notions, not he. He has not one Mrs. Cobbett among all his opinions.

and others might as well think to eject you out of a capital freehold house and estate as think to drive you out of it into the wide world of common sense and argument.

Every man’s house is his castle; and every man’s commonplace is his stronghold, from which he looks out and smiles at the dust and heat of controversy, raised by a number of frivolous and vexatious questions

—“Rings the world with the vain stir!” A cure for this and every other evil would be a Parliamentary Reform; and so we return in a perpetual circle to the point from which we set out.

Alderman Wood has, I should suppose, talked of nothing but the Queen in all companies for the last six months.

Happy Alderman Wood!

Some persons have got a definition of the verb, others a system of shorthand, others a cure for typhus fever, others a method for preventing the counterfeiting of banknotes, which they think the best possible, and indeed the only one.

a Scotchman always leads the discourse to his own country. Some descant on the Kantean philosophy. There is a conceited fellow about town who talks always and everywhere on this subject.

He wears the Categories round his neck like a pearl-chain: he plays off the names of the primary and transcendental qualities like rings on his fingers.

He talks of the Kantean system while he dances; he talks of it while he dines; he talks of it to his children, to his apprentices, to his customers.

He called on me to convince me of it, and said I was only prevented from becoming a complete convert by one or two prejudices. He knows no more about it than a pikestaff. Why then does he make so much ridiculous fuss about it?

It is not that he has got this one idea in his head, but that he has got no other.

A dunce may talk on the subject of the Kantean philosophy with great impunity: if he opened his lips on any other he might be found out.

He knows no more about it than a pikestaff. Why then does he make so much ridiculous fuss about it? It is not that he has got this one idea in his head, but that he has got no other.

A dunce may talk on the subject of the Kantean philosophy with great impunity: if he opened his lips on any other he might be found out.

A French lady who had married an Englishman who said little, excused him by saying, “He is always thinking of Locke and Newton.”

I hate to be surfeited with anything, however sweet. I do not want to be always tied to the same question, as if there were no other in the world.

I like a mind more Catholic.

“I love to talk with mariners, That come from a far countree.”

we need not seal ourselves up hermetically in these precious qualities, so as to think of nothing but our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own voice.

Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito.

Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller’s shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stagecoach, without letting you know who they are.

Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller’s shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stagecoach, without letting you know who they are.

They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster.

I cannot understand this at all. What is the use of a man’s always revolving round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it himself, as well as tire other people.

and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

Books are less often made use of as “spectacles” to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions.

The bookworm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. Nature puts him out.

a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as “spectacles” to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions.

The bookworm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

Nature puts him out. The impressions of real objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous roundabout descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts him;

He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breathe common air.

He is a borrower of sense.

He has no ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources “enfeebles all internal strength of thought,” as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.

The learned author differs from the learned student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads.

The learned are mere literary drudges.

If you set them upon original composition, their heads turn, they don’t know where they are.

shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

Books are less often made use of as “spectacles” to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions.

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers.

It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or in his own mind.

The indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of pictures, who, when they attempt to do anything of their own, find they want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright enough, to trace the living forms of nature.

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

It is an old remark, that boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into the world.

A mediocrity of talent, with a certain slenderness of moral constitution, is the soil that produces the most brilliant specimens of successful prize-essayists and Greek epigrammatists.

It should not be forgotten that the least respectable character among modern politicians was the cleverest boy at Eton.

Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to others, and which we can only derive at secondhand from books or other artificial sources.

He cannot tell whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective.

He knows as much of what he talks about as a blind man does of colours.

He cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he ever in the right in any one of his opinions upon any one matter of fact that really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an infallible judge on …

Such was Dr. ⸻. Such is Dr. ⸻. Such was not Porson. He was an exception that confirmed the general rule, a man that, by uniting talents and knowledge with learning, made the distinction between them more striking and palpable.

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them.

“Books do not teach the use of books.” How should he know anything of a work who knows nothing of the subject of it?

How should he know anything of a work who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end.

He parrots those who have parroted others.

He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he knows nothing of the thing which it means in any one of them.

as Milton’s was scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespeare had not been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To this we owe the unaffected but healthy tone of his dramatic morality.

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.

Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally.

They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all.

They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands.

… or as if he had only to see that they kept time with the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life.

It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill.

It seems as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort. The smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process.

It seems as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort. The smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process.

It is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children.

Some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful, such as the balancing the artificial tree and shooting a bird from each branch through a quill; though none of them have the elegance or facility of the keeping up of the brass balls.

The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell.

What abortions are these essays!

What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do.

It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever anxious application up to manhood can accomplish or make even a slight approach to.

Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account!

—To conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless.

I should never have seen that vigorous elasticity of nerve and precision of movement!”—Is it, then, so easy an undertaking (comparatively) to dance on a tightrope? Let anyone who thinks so get up and try. There is the thing.

It is that which at first we cannot do at all which in the end is done to such perfection.

To account for this in some degree, I might observe that mechanical dexterity is confined to doing some one particular thing, which you can repeat as often as you please, in which you know whether you succeed or fail, and where the point of perfection …

“In argument they own’d his wondrous skill, And e’en though vanquish’d, he could argue still.”

Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars.

So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences)—neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.

… last are the objects of taste and imagination, that is, as they appeal to the sense of beauty, of pleasure, and of power in the human breast, and are explained by that finer sense, and revealed in their inner structure to the eye in return.

Nature is also a language.

Objects, like words, have a meaning; and the true artist is the interpreter of this language, which he can only do by knowing its application to a thousand other objects in a thousand other situations.

He wants the enthusiasm of the poet, the severity of the prose-writer, and the application of the man of business. Talent differs from genius as voluntary differs from involuntary power.

Ingenuity is genius in trifles

; greatness is genius in undertakings of much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious man is one who can do anything well, whether it is worth doing or not;

Popularity is neither fame nor greatness. A king (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own. He merely wields the lever of the state, which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do.

It is the office, not the man we gaze at.

Anyone else in the same situation would be just as much an object of abject curiosity. We laugh at the country girl who having seen a king expressed her disappointment by saying, “Why, he is only a man!”

He merely wields the lever of the state, which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do. It is the office, not the man we gaze at. Anyone else in the same situation would be just as much an object of abject curiosity.

We laugh at the country girl who having seen a king expressed her disappointment by saying, “Why, he is only a man!”

Yet, knowing this, we run to see a king as if he was something more than a man.—To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

A great farce-writer may be a great man; for Molière was but a great farce-writer. In my mind, the author of Don Quixote was a great man. So have there been many others.

A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them.

His style and manner showed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcass of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michelangelo would have hewn a block of marble.

Lord Nelson was a great naval commander; but for myself, I have not much opinion of a seafaring life.

Sir Humphry Davy is a great chemist, but I am not sure that he is a great man. I am not a bit the wiser for any of his discoveries, nor I never met with anyone that was.

He would set about cutting up the carcass of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michelangelo would have hewn a block of marble. Lord Nelson was a great naval commander; but for myself, I have not much opinion of a seafaring life.

Sir Humphry Davy is a great chemist, but I am not sure that he is a great man. I am not a bit the wiser for any of his discoveries, nor I never met with anyone that was.

But it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle. It is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man.

I am not a bit the wiser for any of his discoveries, nor I never met with anyone that was. But it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle.

It is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man.

A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.

But it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle. It is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man.

A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.

I have observed that certain sectaries and polemical writers have no higher compliment to pay their most shining lights than to say that “Such a one was a considerable man in his day.”

A Lord Mayor is hardly a great man. A city orator or patriot of the day only show, by reaching the height of their wishes, the distance they are at from any true ambition.

Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.

A king (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own. He merely wields the lever of the state, which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do.

“Died at his house in Burbage Street, St. Giles’s, John Cavanagh, the famous hand Fives-player.

When a person dies who does any one thing better than anyone else in the world, which so many others are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in society.

It is not likely that anyone will now see the game of Fives played in its perfection for many years to come—for Cavanagh is dead, and has not left his peer behind him.

… interest as it might take in the affairs of men, calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamt of by them.

He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

“He hears the tumult, and is still.” He is not able to mend it, nor willing to mar it.

All this while he is taken up with other things, forgetting himself. He relishes an author’s style without thinking of turning author. He is fond of looking at a print from an old picture in the room, without teasing himself to copy it.

He does not fret himself to death with trying to be what he is not, or to do what he cannot.

He hardly knows what he is capable of, and is not in the least concerned whether he shall ever make a figure in the world. He feels the truth of the lines—

He looks out of himself at the wide, extended prospect of nature, and takes an interest beyond his narrow pretensions in general humanity.

He is free as air, and independent as the wind.

Woe be to him when he first begins to think what others say of him. While a man is contented with himself and his own resources, all is well.

If I was dull, it gave me little concern: if I was lively, I indulged my spirits. I wished well to the world, and believed as favourably of it as I could.

I was like a stranger in a foreign land, at which I looked with wonder, curiosity, and delight, without expecting to be an object of attention in return.

I had no relations to the state, no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife nor child. I lived in a world of contemplation, and not of action.

I had no relations to the state, no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife nor child. I lived in a world of contemplation, and not of action.

This sort of dreaming existence is the best.

He who quits it to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated disappointments and vain regrets. His time, thoughts, and feelings are no longer at his own disposal.

He has no satisfaction but in the reflection of his own image in the public gaze—but in the repetition of his own name in the public ear. He himself is mixed up with and spoils everything.

I wonder Bonaparte was not tired of the N. N.’s stuck all over the Louvre and throughout France.

Goldsmith (as we all know) when in Holland went out into a balcony with some handsome Englishwomen, and on their being applauded by the spectators, turned round and said peevishly, “There are places where I also am admired.”

Most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance.

Old companions are like meats served up too often, that lose their relish and their wholesomeness.

He who looks at beauty to admire, to adore it, who reads of its wondrous power in novels, in poems, or in plays, is not unwise; but let no man fall in love, for from that moment he is “the baby of a girl.”

If I had sufficient provocation to rail at the public, as Ben Jonson did at the audience in the prologues to his plays, I think I should do it in good set terms, nearly as follows:—

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public.

It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. From its unwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition to it, and shakes like isinglass at the touch of a finger.

… power to get the management of it, he shall keep possession of the public ear by virtue of a cant phrase or nickname, and by dint of effrontery and perseverance make all the world believe and repeat what all the world know to be false.

The ear is quicker than the judgment.

We know that certain things are said; by that circumstance alone, we know that they produce a certain effect on the imagination of others, and we conform to their prejudices by mechanical sympathy, and for want of sufficient spirit to differ with them.

Oh, brave public! This epithet proved too much for one of the writers in question, and stuck like a barbed arrow in his heart.

Poor Keats! What was sport to the town was death to him.

Young, sensitive, delicate, he was like

From its unwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition to it, and shakes like isinglass at the touch of a finger. It starts at its own shadow, like the man in the Hartz mountains, and trembles at the mention of its own name.

It has a lion’s mouth, the heart of a hare, with ears erect and sleepless eyes.

It stands “listening its fears.”

It starts at its own shadow, like the man in the Hartz mountains, and trembles at the mention of its own name. It has a lion’s mouth, the heart of a hare, with ears erect and sleepless eyes. It stands “listening its fears.”

It is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment, so that, in short, the public ear is at the mercy of the first impudent pretender who chooses …

The public are not quite so modest. People already begin to talk of the Scotch novels as overrated. How then can common authors be supposed to keep their heads long above water?

As a general rule, all those who live by the public starve, and are made a byword and a standing jest into the bargain.

Posterity is no better (not a bit more enlightened or more liberal), except that you are no longer in their power, and that the voice of common fame saves them the trouble of deciding on your claims.

The public now are the posterity of Milton and Shakespeare. Our posterity will be the living public of a future generation.

When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches.

Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No!—I was complaining of this to a Scotchman who had been attending a dinner and a subscription to raise a monument to Burns.

Every little, low, paltry creature that gaped and wondered, only because others did so, is glad to find you (as he thinks) on a level with himself. An author is not then, after all, a being of another order.

Public admiration is forced, and goes against the grain. Public obloquy is cordial and sincere: every individual feels his own importance in it.

They give you up bound hand and foot into the power of your accusers. To attempt to defend yourself is a high crime and misdemeanor, a contempt of court, an extreme piece of impertinence.

Those persons who are much accustomed to abstract contemplation are generally unfitted for active pursuits, and vice versa. I myself am sufficiently decided and dogmatical in my opinions, and yet in action I am as imbecile as a woman or a child.

I cannot set about the most indifferent thing without twenty efforts, and had rather write one of these Essays than have to seal a letter.

In trying to throw a hat or a book upon a table, I miss it; it just reaches the edge and falls back again, and instead of doing what I mean to perform, I do what I intend to avoid.

Some men are mere machines. They are put in a go-cart of business, and are harnessed to a profession—yoked to Fortune’s wheels. They plod on, and succeed.

Their affairs conduct them, not they their affairs.

All they have to do is to let things take their course, and not go out of the beaten road.

It is much oftener owing to views and wishes bounded but constantly directed to one particular object.

To succeed, a man should aim only at success.

The child of Fortune should resign himself into the hands of Fortune. A plotting head frequently overreaches itself:

… grasp at the slightest possibility of gain as a certainty, and were led into as many mistakes by an overgriping, usurious disposition as they could have been by the most thoughtless extravagance.—We hear a great outcry about the want of judgment in men of genius.

It is not a want of judgment, but an excess of other things.

They err knowingly, and are wilfully blind. The understanding is out of the question. The profound judgment which soberer people pique themselves upon is in truth a want of passion and imagination.

The profound judgment which soberer people pique themselves upon is in truth a want of passion and imagination. Give them an interest in anything, a sudden fancy, a bait for their favourite foible, and who so besotted as they?

Stir their feelings, and farewell to their prudence!

The understanding operates as a motive to action only in the silence of the passions. I have heard people of a sanguine temperament reproached with betting according to their wishes, instead of their opinion who should win;

Give them an interest in anything, a sudden fancy, a bait for their favourite foible, and who so besotted as they? Stir their feelings, and farewell to their prudence!

The understanding operates as a motive to action only in the silence of the passions.

I have heard people of a sanguine temperament reproached with betting according to their wishes, instead of their opinion who should win; and I have seen those who reproached them do the very same thing the instant their own vanity or prejudices are concerned.

… not generally exist in proportion to the narrowness and grossness of his ideas, nothing drawing his attention out of his own sphere, or giving him an interest except in those things which he can realise and bring home to himself in the most undoubted shape?

To the man of business all the world is a fable but the Stock Exchange

: to the money-getter nothing has a real existence that he cannot convert into a tangible feeling, that he does not recognise as property, that he cannot “measure with a two-foot rule or count upon ten fingers.”

There are more ways than one in which the various faculties of the mind may unfold themselves. Neither words nor ideas reducible to words constitute the utmost limit of human capacity.

Man is not a merely talking nor a merely reasoning animal.

Let us then take him as he is, instead of “curtailing him of nature’s fair proportions” to suit our previous notions. Doubtless, there are great characters both in active and contemplative life.

conquerors, statesmen, and kings live but by their names stamped on the page of history. Hume says rightly that more people think about Virgil and Homer (and that continually) than ever trouble their heads about Caesar or Alexander.

In fact, poets are a longer-lived race than heroes: they breathe more of the air of immortality.

They survive more entire in their thoughts and acts. We have all that Virgil or Homer did, as much as if we had lived at the same time with them:

For not only a man’s actions are effaced and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him also: his intellect only is immortal and bequeathed unimpaired to posterity.

Words are the only things that last forever.

If, however, the empire of words and general knowledge is more durable in proportion as it is abstracted and attenuated, it is less immediate and dazzling:

It will not do to set all these aside under any fastidious or pedantic distinction.

Comparisons are odious, because they are impertinent, and lead only to the discovery of defects by making one thing the standard of another which has no relation to it.

If, as someone proposed, we were to institute an inquiry, “Which was the greatest man, Milton or Cromwell, Bonaparte or Rubens?”

Such is the sort of talent that that may be shown and that has been possessed by the great leaders on the stage of the world. To accomplish great things argues, I imagine, great resolution: to design great things implies no common mind.

Ambition is in some sort genius.

Though I would rather wear out my life in arguing a broad speculative question than in caballing for the election to a wardmote, or canvassing for votes in a rotten borough, yet I should think that the loftiest Epicurean philosopher might descend from his punctilio …

Charles Fox had an animated, intelligent eye, and brilliant, elastic forehead (with a nose indicating fine taste), but the lower features were weak, unsettled, fluctuating, and without purchase—it was in them the Whigs were defeated.

What a fine iron binding Bonaparte had round his face, as if it had been cased in steel!

What sensibility about the mouth! What watchful penetration in the eye! What a smooth, unruffled forehead! Mr. Pitt, with little sunken eyes, had a high, retreating forehead, and a nose expressing pride and aspiring self-opinion:

Few things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the circumstance of will-making.

It is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition, and we take care to make a good use of it.

Few things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the circumstance of will-making.

It is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition, and we take care to make a good use of it.

We husband it with jealousy, put it off as long as we can, and then use every precaution that the world shall be no gainer by our deaths.

Where a property is actually bequeathed, supposing the circumstances of the case and the usages of society to leave a practical discretion to the testator, it is most frequently in such portions as can be of the least service.

Where there is much already, much is given; where much is wanted, little or nothing.

Poverty invites a sort of pity, a miserable dole of assistance; necessity, neglect and scorn; wealth attracts and allures to itself more wealth by natural association of ideas or by that innate love of inequality and injustice which is the favourite principle of the imagination.

Poverty invites a sort of pity, a miserable dole of assistance; necessity, neglect and scorn; wealth attracts and allures to itself more wealth by natural association of ideas or by that innate love of inequality and injustice which is the favourite principle of the imagination.

Men like to collect money into large heaps in their lifetime; they like to leave it in large heaps after they are dead.

They grasp it into their own hands, not to use it for their own good, but to hoard, to lock it up, to make an object, an idol, and a wonder of it.

… obloquy and persecution for the sake of truth and liberty, or who sacrificed their lives for their country in a just cause, as visionaries and enthusiasts, who did not understand what was properly due to their own interest and the securing of the main chance.

Man is not the creature of sense and selfishness, even in those pursuits which grow out of that origin, so much as of imagination, custom, passion, whim, and humour.

I have heard of a singular instance of a will made by a person who was addicted to a habit of lying.

… projects were no more!—The extreme keeping in this character is only to be accounted for by supposing such an original constitutional levity as made truth entirely indifferent to him, and the serious importance attached to it by others an object of perpetual sport and ridicule!

The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.

I do not so much find fault with this when it is done as a punishment and oblique satire on servility and selfishness. It is in that case “diamond cut diamond”—a trial of skill between the legacy-hunter and the legacy-maker, which shall fool the other.

It is the wound inflicted upon our self-love, not the stain upon the character of the thoughtless offender, that calls for condign punishment.

Crimes, vices may go unchecked or unnoticed; but it is the laughing at our weaknesses, or thwarting our humours, that is never to be forgotten.

It is not the errors of others, but our own miscalculations, on which we wreak our lasting vengeance. It is ourselves that we cannot forgive.

Crimes, vices may go unchecked or unnoticed; but it is the laughing at our weaknesses, or thwarting our humours, that is never to be forgotten. It is not the errors of others, but our own miscalculations, on which we wreak our lasting vengeance.

It is ourselves that we cannot forgive.

In the will of Nicholas Gimcrack the virtuoso, recorded in the Tatler, we learn, among other items, that his eldest son is cut off with a single cockleshell for his undutiful behaviour in laughing at his little sister whom his father kept preserved in spirits …

Yet it is hardly right, after all, to encourage this kind of pitiful, barefaced intercourse without meaning to pay for it, as the coquette has no right to jilt the lovers she has trifled with.

Flattery and submission are marketable commodities like any other, have their price, and ought scarcely to be obtained under false pretences.

If we see through and despise the wretched creature that attempts to impose on our credulity, we can at any time dispense with his services:

but we meet with continual examples of the desire to keep up the farce (if not the tragedy) of life after we, the performers in it, have quitted the stage, and to have our parts rehearsed by proxy.

We thus make a caprice immortal, a peculiarity proverbial.

Hence we see the number of legacies and fortunes left on condition that the legatee shall take the name and style of the testator, by which device we provide for the continuance of the sounds that formed our names, and endow them with an estate, …

On the contrary, it seems only to deprive them of the little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their wilfulness and shortsightedness.

Some men think that because they are going to be hanged, they are fully authorised to declare a future state of rewards and punishments.

All either indulge their caprices or cling to their prejudices. They make a desperate attempt to escape from reflection by taking hold of any whim or fancy that crosses their minds, or by throwing themselves implicitly on old habits and attachments.

All either indulge their caprices or cling to their prejudices. They make a desperate attempt to escape from reflection by taking hold of any whim or fancy that crosses their minds, or by throwing themselves implicitly on old habits and attachments.

An old man is twice a child: the dying man becomes the property of his family.

He has no choice left, and his voluntary power is merged in old saws and prescriptive usages. The property we have derived from our kindred reverts tacitly to them;

… down seems to be to lure those students on with the hopes of excellence who have no chance of succeeding, and to deter those who have from relying on the only prop and source of real excellence—the strong bent and impulse of their natural powers.

Industry alone can only produce mediocrity; but mediocrity in art is not worth the trouble of industry.

Genius, great natural powers, will give industry and ardour in the pursuit of their proper object, but not if you divert them from that object into the trammels of commonplace mechanical labour.

Or who would stop short of the utmost refinement, precision, and force in the delineation of each?

Ideal expression is not neutral expression, but extreme expression.

Again, character is a thing of peculiarity, of striking contrast, of distinction, and not of uniformity. It is necessarily opposed to Sir Joshua’s exclusive theory, and yet it is surely a curious and interesting field of speculation for the human mind.

What has been, and what can be done in the art, is sufficiently difficult: we need not be mortified or discouraged at not being able to execute the conceptions of a romantic imagination.

Art has its boundaries, though imagination has none.

We can easily, like the ancients, suppose a Jupiter to be possessed of all those powers and perfections which the subordinate Deities were endowed with separately. Yet when they employed their art to represent him, they confined his character to majesty alone.

I do not see much use in dwelling on a commonplace, however fashionable or well established: nor am I very ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless I imagine I have reason on my side.

Originality implies independence of opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest truism.

It consists in seeing and thinking for one’s-self: whereas singularity is only the affectation of saying something to contradict other people, without having any real opinion of one’s own upon the matter. Mr. Burke was an original, though an extravagant writer: Mr.

but I do not take it for granted that every prejudice is ill-founded; nor that every paradox is self-evident, merely because it contradicts the vulgar opinion.

Sheridan once said of some speech in his acute, sarcastic way, that “it contained a great deal both of what was new and what was true: but that unfortunately what was new was not true, and what was true was not new.”

This appears to me to express the whole sense of the question. I do not see much use in dwelling on a commonplace, however fashionable or well established:

… of consequences, an impatient and unsettled turn of mind, the want of sudden and strong excitement, of some new plaything for the imagination, are equally “lords of the ascendant,” and are at every step getting the start of reason, truth, nature, common sense, and feeling.

With one party, whatever is, is right: with their antagonists, whatever is, is wrong.

These swallow every antiquated absurdity: those catch at every new, unfledged project—and are alike enchanted with the velocipedes or the French Revolution.

They think it nothing to hang up a beacon to guide or warn, if they do not at the same time frighten the community like a comet.

They do not mind making their principles odious, provided they can make themselves notorious.

To win over the public opinion by fair means is to them an insipid, commonplace mode of popularity: they would either force it by harsh methods, or seduce it by intoxicating potions.

They indulge only their own flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices, and make idols or bugbears of whatever they please, caring as little for history or particular facts as for general reasoning.

They are dangerous leaders and treacherous followers.

Their inordinate vanity runs them into all sorts of extravagances; and their habitual effeminacy gets them out of them at any price.

“A feather will turn the scale of their avoirdupois”; though the fair authoress was not aware of the metaphysical identity of her principal and subordinate characters. Affectation is the master-key to both.

Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity.

It cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up and revels in the homely pretensions of the mass of mankind. It judges of the worth of everything by name, fashion, and opinion;

It judges of the worth of everything by name, fashion, and opinion; and hence, from the conscious absence of real qualities or sincere satisfaction in itself, it builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the wretchedness and wants of others.

Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.

The difference between the “Great Vulgar and the Small” is mostly in outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaintance.

The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings.

The stupidest slave worships the gaudiest tyrant.

The same gross motives appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility of the dependant;

The difference between the “Great Vulgar and the Small” is mostly in outward circumstances. The coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the backslidings of her frail acquaintance.

Those who have the fewest resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love elsewhere.

The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers: scandal and satire prevail most in country-places; and a propensity to ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what we happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common sense and decency.

It is affecting ignorance, and making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority. It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank coxcombry. It is nothing in the world else.

To condemn because the multitude admire is as essentially vulgar as to admire because they admire.

There is no exercise of taste or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense, and of the two I should prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon agree with my barber as differ from him;

… it is the rage with a large number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set of persons very little, if at all, better informed cry it down to distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal vulgarity and absurdity.

A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.

’Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity;

A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.

’Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable.

Grossness is not vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity; but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the authority of others, or to fall in with the fashion or the company we keep.

Grossness is not vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity; but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the authority of others, or to fall in with the fashion or the company we keep.

Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar.

We might as well spurn the clod under our feet and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, nothing original, can be vulgar;

The upper are not wiser than the lower orders because they resolve to differ from them.

The fashionable have the advantage of the unfashionable in nothing but the fashion.

The true vulgar are the servum pecus imitatorum—the herd of pretenders to what they do not feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life.

The king the other day made Sir Walter Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make another Author of Waverley. Princes, heroes, are often commonplace people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote.

To be an author, to be a painter, is nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade.

“An author! ’tis a venerable name: How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim!”

I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs better than the inhumanity of courts. The violence of the one rages like a fire; the insidious policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and is more fatal and inevitable.

The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive struggles of anarchy.

“Of all evils,” says Hume, “anarchy is the shortest lived.” The one may “break out like a wild overthrow”;

it is more appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of the whisper echoed by other assenting whispers, which doom them first to despair and then to destruction.

Popular fury finds its counterpart in courtly servility.

If every outrage is to be apprehended from the one, every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, without regard to justice or decency. The word of a king, “Go thou and do likewise,” makes the stoutest heart dumb: truth and honesty shrink before it.

To be a wife, and the wife of a knight, are to her pleasures “worn in their newest gloss,” and nothing can exceed her raptures in the contemplation of both parts of the dilemma.

It is not familiarity, but novelty, that weds her to the court.

She rises into the air of gentility from the ground of a city life, and flutters about there with all the fantastic delight of a butterfly that has just changed its caterpillar state.

After visits and finery, a married woman of the old school had nothing to do but to attend to her housewifery. She had no other resource, no other sense of power, but to harangue and lord it over her domestics.

Modern book-education supplies the place of the old-fashioned system of kitchen persecution and eloquence.

A well-bred woman now seldom goes into the kitchen to look after the servants:—formerly what was called a good manager, an exemplary mistress of a family, did nothing but hunt them from morning to night, from one year’s end to another, without leaving them a …

He demonstrates what she would be in conceivable circumstances and under implied conditions. He “gives to airy nothing a local habitation,” not “a name.”

At his touch, words start up into images, thoughts become things.

He clothes a dream, a phantom, with form and colour, and the wholesome attributes of reality. His art is a second nature; not a different one. There are those, indeed, who think that not to copy nature is the rule for attaining perfection.

He “gives to airy nothing a local habitation,” not “a name.” At his touch, words start up into images, thoughts become things. He clothes a dream, a phantom, with form and colour, and the wholesome attributes of reality.

His art is a second nature; not a different one.

There are those, indeed, who think that not to copy nature is the rule for attaining perfection. Because they cannot paint the objects which they have they have, they fancy themselves qualified to paint the ideas which they have not seen.

it is not to come up to, but to fall short of the poorest conception in the public mind. Such pictures should not be hung in the same room with that of Orion.

Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of ideas.

No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was capable of being told by the pencil.

An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human intellect.

His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven.

In his Plague of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His picture of the Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You see a waste of waters, wide, interminable:

… who start back with fear and surprise, the clear breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, “the valleys low, where the mild zephyrs use,” the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospect speak (and forever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!

Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind.

It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind, to con over the relies of ancient art bound up “within the book and volume of the brain, …

It is something to have a collection of this sort to count upon once a year; to have one last, lingering look yet to come.

Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured, and defaced.

There are plenty of standard works still to be found in this country, in the collections at Blenheim, at Burleigh, and in those belonging to Mr.

but in the other he has shown that he could condescend to men of low estate, and after the lightning and the thunderbolt of his pen, lets fall some drops of natural pity over hapless infirmity, mingling strains with the nightingale’s, “most musical, most melancholy.”

The immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our breasts, and a tear falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly hand he presses.

The sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past achievements, loves, and friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself to bear up with cheerful hope and confidence to the last. Some of them are of a more quaint and humorous character;

The great object of the sonnet seems to be, to express in musical numbers, and as it were with undivided breath, some occasional thought or personal feeling, “some fee-grief due to the poet’s breast.”

It is a sigh uttered from the fullness of the heart, an involuntary aspiration born and dying in the same moment.

I have always been fond of Milton’s sonnets for this reason, that they have more of this personal and internal character than any others; and they acquire a double value when we consider that they come from the pen of the loftiest of our poets.

It would be no niggard praise to Mr. Wordsworth to grant that he was either half the man or half the poet that Milton was. He has not his high and various imagination, nor his deep and fixed principle.

Milton did not worship the rising sun, nor turn his back on a losing and fallen cause.

“Such recantation had no charms for him!”

It is a wonder he did not add in a note that Milton called him aside to whisper in his ear that he preferred the new English hexameters to his own blank verse!

Our first of poets was one of our first of men.

He was an eminent instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power and fashion, as is the case with painters and musicians—things without an opinion—and who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the day.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself.

I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.

I am then never less alone than when alone.

“The fields his study, nature was his book.”

“The fields his study, nature was his book.”

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time.

When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticising hedgerows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it.

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticising hedgerows and black cattle.

I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it.

There are those who for this purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I like more elbow-room and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for

When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticising hedgerows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it.

There are those who for this purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them.

I like more elbow-room and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for

“A friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper—solitude is sweet.”

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases.

We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation

but I sometimes had rather be without them. “Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!” I have just now other business in hand, which would seem idle to you, but is with me “very stuff o’ the conscience.”

Is not this wild rose sweet without a comment?

Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat of emerald? Yet if I wore to explain to you the circumstance that has so endeared it to me, you would only smile.

But this looks like a breach of manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the time that you ought to rejoin your party. “Out upon such half-faced fellowship,” say I.

I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or solitary.

I was pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett’s, that “he thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time.”

It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment.

If you only hint what you feel in a kind of dumb show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a toil of a pleasure.

You cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others. I am for this synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical.

For once, I like to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone, or in such company as I do not covet.

I have no objection to argue a point with anyone for twenty miles of measured road, but not for pleasure.

If you remark the scent of a bean-field crossing the road, perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a distant object, perhaps he is shortsighted, and has to take out his glass to look at it.

Then long-forgotten things, like “sunken wrack and sumless treasuries,” burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again.

Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.

No one likes puns, alliterations, antitheses, argument, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes had rather be without them. “Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!”

In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door prospects: it should be reserved for table-talk.

Lamb is for this reason, I take it, the worst company in the world out of doors; because he is the best within.

I grant there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a journey, and that is, what one shall have for supper when we get to our inn at night.

We baffle prejudice and disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be objects of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves.

We are no more those hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the world; an inn restores us to the level of nature, and quits scores with society!

I have certainly spent some enviable hours at inns—sometimes when I have been left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical problem, as once at Witham Common, where I found out the proof that likeness is not a case of the association …

which have since faded into the light of common day, or mock my idle gaze.

The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.

Still I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I would return to it alone.

In travelling through a wild barren country I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one. It appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see of it.

In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the country.

“Beyond Hyde Park,” says Sir Topling Flutter, “all is a desert.” All that part of the map that we do not see before us is blank. The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell.

In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the country. “Beyond Hyde Park,” says Sir Topling Flutter, “all is a desert.” All that part of the map that we do not see before us is blank.

The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell.

It is not one prospect expanded into another, county joined to county, kingdom to kingdom, land to seas, making an image voluminous and vast; the mind can form no larger idea of space than the eye can take in at a single glance.

For instance, what is the true signification of that immense mass of territory and population known by the name of China to us? An inch of pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more account than a China orange!

Things near us are seen of the size of life: things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding.

We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our being only piecemeal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and places.

An inch of pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more account than a China orange! Things near us are seen of the size of life: things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding.

We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our being only piecemeal.

In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and places. The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great variety of tunes, but it must play them in succession.

things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding. We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our being only piecemeal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and places.

The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great variety of tunes, but it must play them in succession.

One idea recalls another, but it at the same time excludes all others. In trying to renew old recollections, we cannot as it were unfold the whole web of our existence; we must pick out the single threads.

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth.

I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!

“Then come in the sweets of the evening”:—the Queen, the coronation, the last new play, the next fight, the insurrection of the Greeks or Neapolitans, the price of stocks, or death of kings, keep them on the alert till bedtime.

No question comes amiss to them that is quite new⁠—none is ever heard of that is at all old.

“That of an hour’s age doth hiss the speaker.”

In the course of half an hour, if they are not more than ordinarily dull, you are sure to find them on opposite sides of the question. This is the sickening part of it.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

We meet neither with modest ignorance nor studious acquirement. Their knowledge has been taken in too much by snatches to digest properly. There is neither sincerity nor system in what they say.

He puts his sentences together as printers set up types, letter by letter. There is certainly no principle of shorthand in his mode of elocution.

He goes round for a meaning, and the sense waits for him.

It is not conversation, but rehearsing a part. Men of education and men of the world order this matter better. They know what they have to say on a subject, and come to the point at once.

He puts his sentences together as printers set up types, letter by letter. There is certainly no principle of shorthand in his mode of elocution. He goes round for a meaning, and the sense waits for him.

It is not conversation, but rehearsing a part.

Men of education and men of the world order this matter better. They know what they have to say on a subject, and come to the point at once. Your coffeehouse politician balances between what he heard last and what he shall say next;

If you hint some obvious oversight, they know what you are going to say, and were aware of the objection before you uttered it:—“So shall their anticipation prevent your discovery.”

By being in the right you gain no advantage: by being in the wrong you are entitled to the benefit of their pity or scorn.

It is sometimes curious to see a select group of our little Gotham getting about a knotty point that will bear a wager, as whether Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary was originally published in quarto or folio.

This brings the severity of his political principles into question, if not into contempt. He would abolish the national debt from motives of personal economy, and objects to Mr. Canning’s pension because it perhaps takes a farthing a year out of his own pocket.

A great deal of radical reasoning has its source in this feeling.

—He bestows no small quantity of his tediousness upon Mounsey, on whose mind all these formulas and diagrams fall like seed on stony ground:

Mounsey, from long practice, has got over this difficulty, and uses it incessantly. It is no matter what adjunct follows in the train of this despised monosyllable—whatever liquid comes after this prefix is welcome.

Mounsey, without being the most communicative, is the most conversible man I know.

The social principle is inseparable from his person. If he has nothing to say, he drinks your health; and when you cannot, from the rapidity and carelessness of his utterance, catch what he says, you assent to it with equal confidence:

said the man of utility. “I don’t know,” replied the other, quaffing another glass of sparkling ale, and with a lambent fire playing in his eye and round his bald forehead—(he had a head that Sir Joshua would have made something bland and genial of)—

“I don’t know, but they were delightful to me at the time, and are still pleasant to talk and think of.”

—Such a one, in Touchstone’s phrase, is a natural philosopher; and in nine cases out of ten that sort of philosophy is the best! I could enlarge this sketch, such as it is;

Sympathy is necessary to society. To look on, a variety of faces, humours, and opinions is sufficient; to mix with others, agreement as well as variety is indispensable.

What makes good society? I answer, in one word, real fellowship.

Without a similitude of tastes, acquirements, and pursuits (whatever may be the difference of tempers and characters) there can be no intimacy or even casual intercourse worth the having. What makes the most agreeable party?

You laugh not in proportion to a man’s wit, but his wealth; you have to consider not what, but whom you contradict.

You speak by the pound, and are heard by the rood.

In the metropolis there is neither time nor inclination for these remote calculations. Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

In the country, they consider whether you have a vote at the next election or a place in your gift, and measure the capacity of others to instruct or entertain them by the strength of their pockets and their credit with their banker.

Personal merit is at a prodigious discount in the provinces.

I like the country very well if I want to enjoy my own company;

The longer it is delayed and kept sacred from the vulgar gaze, the more it swells into imaginary consequence; the labour and care required for a work of this kind being immense;—and then there are no faults in an unexecuted translation.

The only impeccable writers are those that never wrote.

Another is an oracle on subjects of taste and classical erudition, because (he says at least) he reads Cicero once a year to keep up the purity of his Latinity.

While they fancy they are accommodating themselves to, or else assuming airs of importance over, inferior capacities, these inferior capacities are really laughing at them.

There can be no true superiority but what arises out of the presupposed ground of equality: there can be no improvement but from the free communication and comparing of ideas.

Kings and nobles, for this reason, receive little benefit from society—where all is submission on one side, and condescension on the other. The mind strikes out truth by collision, as steel strikes fire from the flint!

there can be no improvement but from the free communication and comparing of ideas. Kings and nobles, for this reason, receive little benefit from society—where all is submission on one side, and condescension on the other.

The mind strikes out truth by collision, as steel strikes fire from the flint!

There are whole families who are born classical, and are entered in the heralds’ college of reputation by the right of consanguinity. Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood. There is the Burney family. There is no end of it or its pretensions.

If I had ventured upon such an assertion as this, it would have been worse for me than finding out a borrowed line in the “Pleasures of Hope.”

There is not a more helpless or more despised animal than a mere author, without any extrinsic advantages of birth, breeding, or fortune to set him off.

The real ore of talents or learning must be stamped before it will pass current. To be at all looked upon as an author, a man must be something more or less than an author—a rich merchant, a banker, a lord, or a ploughman.

Your opinion is honest, you will say; then ten to one it is not profitable. It is at any rate your own. So much the worse; for then it is not the world’s. Tom Hill is a very tolerable barometer in this respect.

He knows nothing, hears everything, and repeats just what he hears; so that you may guess pretty well from this round-faced echo what is said by others!

Almost everything goes by presumption and appearances. “Did you not think Mr. B⸺’s language very elegant?”—I thought he bowed very low. “Did you not think him remarkably well-behaved?”—He was unexceptionably dressed. “But were not Mr. C⸺’s manners quite insinuating?”—He said nothing.

“But were not Mr. C⸺’s manners quite insinuating?”—He said nothing. “You will at least allow his friend to be a well-informed man.”—talked upon all subjects alike. Such would be a pretty faithful interpretation of the tone of what is called “good society.”

The surface is everything; we do not pierce to the core. The setting is more valuable than the jewel.

Is it not so in other things as well as letters? Is not an R.A. by the supposition a greater man in his profession than anyone who is not so blazoned?

A Member of Parliament must be answerable that you are not dangerous or dull before you can be of the entrée. You must commence toad-eater to have your observations attended to; if you are independent, unconnected, you will be regarded as a poor creature.

Your opinion is honest, you will say; then ten to one it is not profitable. It is at any rate your own. So much the worse; for then it is not the world’s.

Tom Hill is a very tolerable barometer in this respect. He knows nothing, hears everything, and repeats just what he hears; so that you may guess pretty well from this round-faced echo what is said by others! Almost everything goes by presumption and appearances.

There is Britton, the responsible conductor of several works of taste and erudition, yet (God knows) without an idea in his head relating to any one of them.

He is learned by proxy, and successful from sheer imbecility.

If he were to get the smallest smattering of the departments which are under his control, he would betray himself from his desire to shine; but as it is, he leaves others to do all the drudgery for him.

They cannot exactly tell whether you are right or wrong; and if you state your difficulties or pay much deference to the sentiments of others, they will think you a very silly fellow or a mere pretender.

A sweeping, unqualified assertion ends all controversy, and sets opinion at rest.

A sharp, sententious, cavalier, dogmatical tone is therefore necessary, even in self-defence, to the office of a reviewer. If you do not deliver your oracles without hesitation, how are the world to receive them on trust and without inquiry?

A sharp, sententious, cavalier, dogmatical tone is therefore necessary, even in self-defence, to the office of a reviewer. If you do not deliver your oracles without hesitation, how are the world to receive them on trust and without inquiry?

People read to have something to talk about, and “to seem to know that which they do not.”

Consequently, there cannot be too much dialectics and debatable matter, too much pomp and paradox, in a review. To elevate and surprise is the great rule for producing a dramatic or critical effect.

we know to a nicety how it squares with the threadbare rules of composition, not in the least how it affects the principles of taste.

We know everything about the work, and nothing of it.

The critic takes good care not to baulk the reader’s fancy by anticipating the effect which the author has aimed at producing. To be sure, the works so handled were often worthy of their commentators;

… no fine history without portraiture, that the painter must proceed from that ground to the one above it, and that a hundred bad heads cannot make one good historical picture, and they will not believe you, though the thing is obvious to any gross capacity.

Their ideas always fly to the circumference, and never fix at the centre.

Art must be on a grand scale; according to them, the whole is greater than a part, and the greater necessarily implies the less.

In singing the last verse of “God Save the King” not long ago her voice towered above the whole confused noise of the orchestra like an eagle piercing the clouds, and poured “such sweet thunder” through the ear as excited equal astonishment and rapture!

Some kinds of criticism are as much too insipid as others are too pragmatical.

It is not easy to combine point with solidity, spirit with moderation and candour. Many persons see nothing but beauties in a work, others nothing but defects.

I shall not pretend to say how far this remark may be true.

The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.

Besides temporary or accidental biases of this kind, there seem to be sects and parties in taste and criticism (with a set of appropriate watchwords) coeval with the arts of composition, and that will last as long as the difference with which men’s minds are …

If you had a favourite author, he had read him too, and knew all the best morsels, the subtle traits, the capital touches.

“Do you like Sterne?” “Yes, to be sure,” he would say; “I should deserve to be hanged if I didn’t!”

His repeating some parts of Comus with his fine, deep, mellow-toned voice, particularly the lines, “I have heard my mother Circe with the Sirens three,” etc., and the enthusiastic comments he made afterwards, were a feast to the ear and to the soul.

He read the poetry of Milton with the same fervour and spirit of devotion that I have since heard others read their own.

“That is the most delicious feeling of all,” I have heard him explain, “to like what is excellent, no matter whose it is.”

In this respect he practised what he preached. He was incapable of harbouring a sinister motive, and judged only from what he felt. There was no flaw or mist in the clear mirror of his mind.

He was as open to impressions as he was strenuous in maintaining them. He did not care a rush whether a writer was old or new, in prose or in verse—“What he wanted,” he said, “was something to make him think.”

Most men’s minds are to me like musical instruments out of tune.

Touch a particular key, and it jars and makes harsh discord with your own. They like Gil Blas, but can see nothing to laugh at in Don Quixote: they adore Richardson, but are disgusted with Fielding. Fawcett had a taste accommodated to all these.

They discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel.

They see farther into a millstone than most others.

If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him forever: his intricacies are their delight, his mysteries are their study. They prefer Sir Thomas Browne to the Rambler by Dr. Johnson, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to all the writers of the Georgian Age.

“An ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet!”

Nothing goes down with them but what is caviar to the multitude. They are eaters of olives and readers of black-letter.

Yet they smack of genius, and would be worth any money, were it only for the rarity of the thing!

They degrade by reducing you to their own standard of merit; for the qualifications they deny you, or the faults they object, are so very insignificant, that to prove yourself possessed of the one or free from the other is to make yourself doubly ridiculous.

Littleness is their element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch.

They creep, buzz, and fly-blow. It is much easier to crush than to catch these troublesome insects; and when they are in your power your self-respect spares them.

“Anon as patient as the female dove, His silence will sit drooping.”

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.

We can afford to dally and play tricks with the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol or the insolence of King Cambyses’ vein. To great evils we submit;

We can afford to dally and play tricks with the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol or the insolence of King Cambyses’ vein.

To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations.

I have before now been disappointed of a hundred pound job and lost half a crown at rackets on the same day, and been more mortified at the latter than the former.

This does not prove by our theory that he did not use to fly into violent passions with Talleyrand for plaguing him with bad news when things went wrong. He was mad at uncertain forebodings of disaster, but resigned to its consummation.

A man may dislike impertinence, yet have no quarrel with necessity!

There is another consideration that may take off our wonder at the firmness with which the principals in great vicissitudes of fortune bear their fate, which is, that they are in the secret of its operations, and know that what to others appears chance-medley was …

… most important sense of the term, little more seems necessary than to be convinced of the truth of the maxim which the wise man repeated to the daughter of King Cophetua, That if a thing is, it is, and there is an end of it!

We often make life unhappy in wishing things to have turned out otherwise than they did, merely because that is possible to the imagination, which is impossible in fact.

I remember, when Lamb’s farce was damned (for damned it was, that’s certain), I used to dream every night for a month after (and then I vowed I would plague myself no more about it) that it was revived at one of the minor or …

Rackets (I might observe, for the sake of the uninformed reader) is, like any other athletic game, very much a thing of skill and practice; but it is also a thing of opinion, “subject to all the skyey influences.”

If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.

If you hesitate in striking at the ball, it is ten to one but you miss it. If you are apprehensive of committing some particular error (such as striking the ball foul) you will be nearly sure to do it.

Let us turn down some alley!” He felt he should be more at home there.

Lamb said of an old acquaintance of his, that when he was young he wanted to be a tailor, but had not spirit!

This is the misery of unequal matches. The woman cannot easily forget, or think that others forget, her origin; and, with perhaps superior sense and beauty, keeps painfully in the background.

The simpletons only laughed, and said that “those were not the sort of things to gain the affections.” I wish I had kept copies in my own justification. What is worse, I have an utter aversion to bluestockings.

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

If I know that she has read anything I have written, I cut her acquaintance immediately. This sort of literary intercourse with me passes for nothing. Her critical and scientific acquirements are “carrying coals to Newcastle.”

I would have her read my soul: she should understand the language of the heart: she should know what I am, as if she were another self! She should love me for myself alone.

I like myself without any reason: I would have her do so too.

This is not very reasonable. I abstract from my temptations to admire all the circumstances of dress, birth, breeding, fortune; and I would not willingly put forward my own pretensions, whatever they may be.

But if I do not build my claim to regard on the pretensions I have, how can I build it on those I am totally without? Or why do I complain and expect to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Thought has in me cancelled pleasure; and this dark forehead, bent upon truth, is the rock on which all affection has split.

And thus I waste my life in one long sigh; nor ever (till too late) beheld a gentle face turned gently upon mine! … But no!

Oh! if I am deceived, let me be deceived still. Let me live in the Elysium of those soft looks; poison me with kisses, kill me with smiles; but still mock me with thy love!

Poets choose mistresses who have the fewest charms, that they may make something out of nothing.

They succeed best in fiction, and they apply this rule to love. They make a goddess of any dowdy.

Poets choose mistresses who have the fewest charms, that they may make something out of nothing. They succeed best in fiction, and they apply this rule to love.

They make a goddess of any dowdy.

As Don Quixote said, in answer to the matter-of-fact remonstrances of Sancho, that Dulcinea del Toboso answered the purpose of signalising his valour just as well as the “fairest princess under sky,” so any of the fair sex will serve them to write about just …

Tray, you don’t know the mischief you have done!”

Many persons would not forgive the overturning a cup of chocolate so soon.

I remember hearing an instance some years ago of a man of character and property, who through unexpected losses had been condemned to a long and heartbreaking imprisonment, which he bore with exemplary fortitude.

but he failed in this, that he did not calculate the resistance which barbarism makes to refinement. He thought that the Russians could not burn Moscow, because the Parisians could not burn Paris. The French think everything must be French.

The Cossacks, alas! do not conform to etiquette: the rudeness of the seasons knows no rules of politeness!

Some artists think it a test of genius to paint a large picture; and I grant the truth of this position, if the large picture contains more than a small one.

I think I could as soon get up the budget of Ways and Means for the current year, as be sure of making both ends meet, and paying my rent at quarter-day in a paltry huckster’s shop.

Great objects move on by their own weight and impulse; great power turns aside petty obstacles; and he who wields it is often but the puppet of circumstances, like the fly on the wheel that said, “What a dust we raise!”

It is easier to ruin a kingdom and aggrandise one’s own pride and prejudices than to set up a greengrocer’s stall. An idiot or a madman may do this at any time, whose word is law, and whose nod is fate.

It is not easy to write a familiar style.

Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random.

If a fine style depended on this sort of arbitrary pretension, it would be fair to judge of an author’s elegance by the measurement of his words and the substitution of foreign circumlocutions (with no precise associations) for the mother-tongue.

How simple is it to be dignified without case, to be pompous without meaning!

Surely it is but a mechanical rule for avoiding what is low, to be always pedantic and affected. It is clear you cannot use a vulgar English word if you never use a common English word at all.

All provincial or bye-phrases come under the same mark of reprobation—all such as the writer transfers to the page from his fireside or a particular coterie, or that he invents for his own sole use and convenience.

I conceive that words are like money, not the worse for being common, but that it is the stamp of custom alone that gives them circulation or value.

I am fastidious in this respect, and would almost as soon coin the currency of the realm as counterfeit the King’s English.

or as the pegs and nails are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth.

I hate to see a load of bandboxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.

A person who does not deliberately dispose of all his thoughts alike in cumbrous draperies and flimsy disguises may strike out twenty varieties of familiar everyday language, each coming somewhat nearer to the feeling he wants to convey, and at last not hit upon that …

… I would not use any phrase that had been brought into fashion before the middle or the end of the last century, but I should be shy of using any that had not been employed by any approved author during the whole of that time.

Words, like clothes, get old-fashioned, or mean and ridiculous, when they have been for some time laid aside.

Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors that the idea of imitation is almost done away.

“Nothing,” it might be answered. The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them.

When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine.

Look through the dictionary, and cull out a florilegium, rival the tulippomania. Rouge high enough, and never mind the natural complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look of preternatural health and vigour;

the first is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine. Look through the dictionary, and cull out a florilegium, rival the tulippomania.

Rouge high enough, and never mind the natural complexion.

The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable, who regard only appearances, will be delighted with the imposition. Keep to your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well.

With a sovereign contempt for what is familiar and natural, they are the slaves of vulgar affectation—of a routine of high-flown phrases. Scorning to imitate realities, they are unable to invent anything, to strike out one original idea.

They are not copyists of nature, it is true; but they are the poorest of all plagiarists, the plagiarists of words.

All is far-fetched, dear bought, artificial, oriental in subject and allusion; all is mechanical, conventional, vapid, formal, pedantic in style and execution. They startle and confound the understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations;

They may pay for it hereafter. But that is no matter. They snatch a joy beyond the reach of fate, and consider the present time sacred, inviolable, unaccountable to that hard, churlish, niggard, inexorable taskmaster, the future.

Now or never is their motto.

They are madly devoted to the plaything, the ruling passion of the moment. What is to happen to them a week hence is as if it were to happen to them a thousand years hence.

The mind given up to self-indulgence revolts at suffering, and throws it from it as an unaccountable anomaly, as a piece of injustice when it comes. Much less will it acknowledge any affinity with or subjection to it as a mere threat.

If the prediction does not immediately come true, we laugh at the prophet of ill: if it is verified, we hate our adviser proportionably, hug our vices the closer, and hold them dearer and more precious the more they cost us.

We resent wholesome counsel as an impertinence, and consider those who warn us of impending mischief as if they had brought it on our heads. We cry out with the poetical enthusiast—

If the prediction does not immediately come true, we laugh at the prophet of ill: if it is verified, we hate our adviser proportionably, hug our vices the closer, and hold them dearer and more precious the more they cost us.

We resent wholesome counsel as an impertinence, and consider those who warn us of impending mischief as if they had brought it on our heads.

We cry out with the poetical enthusiast—

There is another branch of this character, which is the trifling or dilatory character. Such persons are always creating difficulties, and unable or unwilling to remove them.

They cannot brush aside a cobweb, and are stopped by an insect’s wing.

Their character is imbecility, rather than effeminacy. The want of energy and resolution in the persons last described arises from the habitual and inveterate predominance of other feelings and motives;

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.

I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it.

He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends or to accomplish a useful object. If he can serve you, he will do so;

and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself.

Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch.

When I was a boy, I lived within sight of a range of lofty hills, whose blue tops blending with the setting sun had often tempted my longing eyes and wandering feet.

At last I put my project in execution, and on a nearer approach, instead of glimmering air woven into fantastic shapes, found them huge lumpish heaps of discoloured earth.

I learnt from this (in part) to leave “Yarrow unvisited,” and not idly to disturb a dream of good!

Distance of time has much the same effect as distance of place. It is not surprising that fancy colours the prospect of the future as it thinks good, when it even effaces the forms of memory. Time takes out the sting of pain;

Not only the untried steep ascent before us, but the rude, unsightly masses of our past experience presently resume their power of deception over the eye: the golden cloud soon rests upon their heads, and the purple light of fancy clothes their barren sides!

Thus we pass on, while both ends of our existence touch upon Heaven!

There is (so to speak) “a mighty stream of tendency” to good in the human mind, upon which all objects float and are imperceptibly borne along;

“Such tricks hath strong imagination!”

In truth we impose upon ourselves, and know not what we wish.

It is a cunning artifice, a quaint delusion, by which, in pretending to be what we were at a particular moment of time, we would fain be all that we have since been, and have our lives to come over again.

In contemplating its utmost verge, we overlook the map of our existence, and retread, in apprehension, the journey of life.

So it is that in early youth we strain our eager sight after the pursuits of manhood; and, as we are sliding off the stage, strive to gather up the toys and flowers that pleased our thoughtless childhood.

When I was quite a boy my father used to take me to the Montpelier Tea Gardens at Walworth. Do I go there now? No; the place is deserted, and its borders and its beds o’erturned. Is there, then, nothing that can

… beans coming up, I immediately think of those which I used so carefully to water of an evening at Wem, when my day’s tasks were done, and of the pain with which I saw them droop and hang down their leaves in the morning’s sun.

Again, I never see a child’s kite in the air but it seems to pull at my heart.

It is to me “a thing of life.” I feel the twinge at my elbow, the flutter and palpitation, with which I used to let go the string of my own, as it rose in the air, and towered among the clouds.

… in a paper in the Indicator, on the productions of the toy-shops of the metropolis, that if I were to insist more on it I should only pass for an imitator of that ingenious and agreeable writer, and for an indifferent one into the bargain.

Sounds, smells, and sometimes tastes, are remembered longer than visible objects, and serve, perhaps, better for links in the chain of association.

The reason seems to be this: they are in their nature intermittent, and comparatively rare; whereas objects of sight are always before us, and, by their continuous succession, drive one another out. The eye is always open;

The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the heart like the calm beauty of death; fancy caught the sound, and faith mounted on it to the skies.

It filled the valley like a mist, and still poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!

There is a curious and interesting discussion on the comparative distinctness of our visual and other external impressions, in Mr. Fearn’s Essay on Consciousness, with which I shall try to descend from this rhapsody to the ground of common sense and plain reasoning again.

whereas individuals are concrete existences, not arbitrary denominations or nicknames; and have innumerable other qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, besides the damning feature with which we fill up the portrait or caricature in our previous fancies.

We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.

An acute observer complained, that if there was anyone to whom he had a particular spite, and a wish to let him see it, the moment he came to sit down with him his enmity was disarmed by some unforeseen circumstance.

so you are just where you were. I am not very fond of anonymous criticism; I want to know who the author can be: but the moment I learn this, I am satisfied. Even ⸻ would do well to come out of his disguise.

It is the mask only that we dread and hate: the man may have something human about him!

The notions, in short, which we entertain of people from a distance, or from partial representations, or from guesswork, are simple uncompounded ideas, which answer to nothing in reality:

Report or imagination seldom raises any individual so high in our estimation as to disappoint us greatly when we are introduced to him: prejudice and malice constantly exaggerate defects beyond the reality.

Ignorance alone makes monsters or bugbears: our actual acquaintances are all very commonplace people.

The thing is, that as a matter of hearsay or conjecture, we make abstractions of particular vices, and irritate ourselves against some particular quality or action of the person we dislike: whereas individuals are concrete existences, not arbitrary denominations or nicknames;

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment.

They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.

… opposition of interest or clashing of prejudice, but it becomes a habit and a favourite amusement in those who are “dressed in a little brief authority,” to thwart, annoy, insult, and harass others on all occasions where the least opportunity or pretext for it occurs.

Spite, bickerings, backbiting, insinuations, lies, jealousies, nicknames are the order of the day, and nobody knows what it’s all about.

One would think that the mayor, aldermen, and liverymen were a higher and more select species of animals than their townsmen; though there is no difference whatever but in their gowns and staff of office! This is the essence of the esprit de corps.

Beyond that point the nerve is bound up, the conscience is seared, and the torpedo-touch of so much inert matter operates to deaden the best feelings and harden the heart. Laughter and tears are said to be the characteristic signs of humanity.

Laughter is common enough in such places as a set-off to the mock-gravity; but who ever saw a public body in tears?

Nothing but a job or some knavery can keep them serious for ten minutes together.

and they do this the more, the more glaring the inconsistency and want of sound reasoning; for they think they thus give proof of their zeal and attachment to the abstract principle on which old establishments exist, the ground of prescription and authority.

The greater the wrong, the greater the right, in all such cases.

The esprit de corps does not take much merit to itself for upholding what is justifiable in any system, or the proceedings of any party, but for adhering to what is palpably injurious. You may exact the first from an enemy:

They may be said to resemble antiquated coquettes of the last age, who think everything ridiculous and intolerable but what was in fashion when they were young, and yet are standing proofs of the progress of taste and the vanity of human pretensions.

Our universities are, in a great measure, become cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge.

The age has the start of them;

In this sort of wretched tracasserie the Barrys and H⸺s stand no chance with the Catons, the Tubbs, and F⸺s. Sir Joshua even was obliged to hold himself aloof from them, and Fuseli passes as a kind of nondescript, or one of his own grotesques.

The air of an academy, in short, is not the air of genius and immortality; it is too close and heated, and impregnated with the notions of the common sort.

A man steeped in a corrupt atmosphere of this description is no longer open to the genial impulses of nature and truth, nor sees visions of ideal beauty, nor dreams of antique grace and grandeur, nor has the finest works of art continually hovering and …

They have no other clue to guide them to their object but either the dictates of the heart or the universally understood sentiments of society, neither of which are likely to be in the wrong.

The flame which bursts out and blazes from popular sympathy is made of honest but homely materials.

It is not kindled by sparks of wit or sophistry, nor damped by the cold calculations of self-interest. The multitude may be wantonly set on by others, as is too often the case, or be carried too far in the impulse of rage and disappointment;

it is either committing their pretensions a little indiscreetly, or confirming their own judgment by a clapping of hands. If you only go and give the cue lustily, the house seems in wonderful accord with your opinions.

An actor, like a king, should only appear on state occasions.

He loses popularity by too much publicity; or, according to the proverb, familiarity breeds contempt.

Spare me this insight into secrets I am not bound to know.

The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress.

Why should we look behind the glass of fashion? Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water? Trust a little to first appearances—leave something to fancy.

Spare me this insight into secrets I am not bound to know. The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress. Why should we look behind the glass of fashion?

Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water?

Trust a little to first appearances—leave something to fancy. I observe that the great puppets of the real stage, who themselves play a grand part, like to get into the boxes over the stage;

Oh! while I live, let me not be admitted (under special favour) to an actor’s dressing-room.

Let me not see how Cato painted, or how Caesar combed!

Let me not meet the prompt-boys in the passage, nor see the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls, nor hear the creaking of machines, or the fiddlers laughing; nor see a Columbine practising a pirouette in sober sadness, nor Mr.

Petrarch complains that “Nature had made him different from other people”—singular’ d’ altri genti.

The great happiness of life is, to be neither better nor worse than the general run of those you meet with.

If you are beneath them, you are trampled upon; if you are above them, you soon find a mortifying level in their difference to what you particularly pique yourself upon. What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam?

If you are beneath them, you are trampled upon; if you are above them, you soon find a mortifying level in their difference to what you particularly pique yourself upon.

What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam?

“To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” So says Shakespeare;

“Stand all astonished, like a sort of steers, ’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race Unwares is chanced, far straying from his peers: So will their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.”

Ignorance of another’s meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear produces hatred

: hence the suspicion and rancour entertained against all those who set up for greater refinement and wisdom than their neighbours.

You cannot make them see with your eyes, and they must judge for themselves.

Intellectual is not like bodily strength. You have no hold of the understanding of others but by their sympathy.

Your knowing, in fact, so much more about a subject does not give you a superiority, that is, a power over them, but only renders it the more impossible for you to make the least impression on them. Is it, then, an advantage to you?

I dread that certain anonymous criticisms should get into the hands of servants where I go, or that my hatter or shoemaker should happen to read them, who cannot possibly tell whether they are well or ill founded.

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.

There are people whose good opinion or goodwill you want, setting aside all literary pretensions; and it is hard to lose by an ill report (which you have no means of rectifying) what you cannot gain by a good one.

I have been more disposed to resent it as I have seen it practised upon others, where I have been better able to judge of the extent of the mischief, and the heartlessness and idiot folly it discovered.

I do not think great intellectual attainments are any recommendation to the women. They puzzle them, and are a diversion to the main question.

If scholars talk to ladies of what they understand, their hearers are none the wiser: if they talk of other things, they prove themselves fools. The conversation between Angelica and Foresight in Love for Love is a receipt in full for all such overstrained nonsense:

He would no doubt be satisfied if every delicate, sceptical invalid in his majesty’s dominions gave his Elixir one trial, merely to show the absurdity of the thing.

We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in nostrums, but are willing to see ourselves whether there is any truth in them.

There is a strong tendency in the human mind to flatter itself with secret hopes, with some lucky reservation in our own favour, though reason may point out the grossness of the trick in general;

The ignorant and idle believe what they read, as Scotch philosophers demonstrate the existence of a material world, and other learned propositions, from the evidence of their senses. The ocular proof is all that is wanting in either case.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

We can hardly believe a thing to be a lie, though we know it to be so.

The ocular proof is all that is wanting in either case. As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

We can hardly believe a thing to be a lie, though we know it to be so.

The “puff direct,” even as it stands in the columns of the Times newspaper, branded with the title of “Advertisement” before it, claims some sort of attention and respect for the merits that it discloses, though we think the candidate for public favour and support …

It is not to be supposed that he would say such things of his picture unless they were allowed by all the world; and he repeats them, on this gentle understanding, till all the world allows them.

So Reputation runs in a vicious circle, and Merit limps behind it, mortified and abashed at its own insignificance.

It has been said that the test of fame or popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by others, or is brought to their recollection in the course of a year.

… on the discovery before us, or join in crying it up to the skies, we then set to work to prove that this is a vulgar delusion, and show our sagacity and freedom from prejudice by pulling it in pieces with all the coolness imaginable.

Whether we blow the bubble or crush it in our hands, vanity and the desire of empty distinction are equally at the bottom of our sanguine credulity or fastidious scepticism.

There are some who always fall in with the fashionable prejudice as others affect singularity of opinion on all such points, according as they think they have more or less wit to judge for themselves.

This method is more inexcusable than the other. For there is no egotism or vanity so hateful as that which strikes at our satisfaction in everything else, and derives its nourishment from preying, like the vampire, on the carcase of others’ reputation.

I would rather, in a word, that a man should talk forever of himself with vapid, senseless assurance, than preserve a malignant, heartless silence when the merit of a rival is mentioned.

I have seen instances of both, and can judge pretty well between them.

Everyone sets himself off to the best advantage he can, and tries to steal a march upon public opinion. In this sense, too, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Life itself is a piece of harmless quackery.

A great house over your head is of no use but to announce the great man within. Dress, equipage, title, livery-servants are only so many quack advertisements and assumptions of the question of merit.

they are as lavish of detraction as they were prurient with praise; and the protégé and admirer of the editor of the ⸻ figures in Blackwood’s train.

The man is a lackey, and it is of little consequence whose livery he wears!

I would advise those who volunteer the office of puffing to go the whole length of it. No half-measures will do. Lay it on thick and threefold, or not at all.

I confess, for one, I am not on the list; at which I do not grieve much, nor wonder at all. Authors, in general, are not in much request.

Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not more frequently invited out; and he said, “Because great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped.”

Garrick was not in this predicament: he could amuse the company in the drawing-room by imitating the great moralist and lexicographer, and make the negro-boy in the courtyard die with laughing to see him take off the swelling airs and strut of the turkey-cock.

the spectator, who has ever seen their pictures by Titian, judges of them at once, and truly.

I had rather leave a good portrait of myself behind me than have a fine epitaph.

The face, for the most part, tells what we have thought and felt—the rest is nothing. I prefixed to his poems than from anything he ever wrote.

Caesar’s Commentaries would not have redeemed him in my opinion, if the bust of him had resembled the Duke of Wellington. My old friend Fawcett used to say, that if Sir Isaac Newton himself had lisped, he could not have thought anything of him.

So I cannot persuade myself that anyone is a great man who looks like a fool. In this I may be wrong.

First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions.

The best part of his existence is dull, cloudy, leaden: the flashes of light that proceed from it, or streak it here and there, may dazzle others, but do not deceive himse deficiency it indicates.

He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.

Whatever good properties he may possess are, in fact, neutralised by a “cold rheum” running through his veins, and taking away the zest of his pretensions, the pith and marrow of his performances. What is it to me that I can write these Table-Talks?

One reason that we do not see it in any other way may be, that they are all the time trying to conceal this defect by every means in their power.

There is, luckily, a sort of second sight in morals: we discern the lurking indications of temper and habit a long while before their palpable effects appear.

I once used to meet with a person at an ordinary, a very civil, good-looking man in other respects, but with an odd look about his eyes, which I could not explain, as if he saw you under their fringed lids, and you could not …

One would think that near relations, who live constantly together, and always have done so, must be pretty well acquainted with one another’s characters. They are nearly in the dark about it.

Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction: interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.

We have no opinion on the subject, any more than of one another’s faces. The Penates, the household gods, are veiled. We do not see the features of those we love, nor do we clearly distinguish their virtues or their vices.

They are nearly in the dark about it. Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction: interest and prejudice take away the power of judging. We have no opinion on the subject, any more than of one another’s faces.

The Penates, the household gods, are veiled.

We do not see the features of those we love, nor do we clearly distinguish their virtues or their vices. We take them as they are found in the lump—by weight, and not by measure.

and perhaps this obstinate, pertinacious indecision would be the truest philosophy in other cases, where we dispose of the question of character easily, because we have only the smallest part of the evidence to decide upon.

Real character is not one thing, but a thousand things

; actual qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but rest upon their own truth and nature.

If we knew them better, we should be disposed to say less about them.

In the truth of things, there are none utterly worthless, none without some drawback on their pretensions or some alloy of imperfection.

It has been observed that a familiarity with the worst characters lessens our abhorrence of them; and a wonder is often expressed that the greatest criminals look like other men. The reason is that they are like other men in many respects.

One man can do but one thing.

Universal pretensions end in nothing.

Or, as Butler has it, too much wit requires

… is surely the ideal in landscape-composition, if the ideal has its source in the interest excited by a subject, in its power of drawing the affections after it linked in a golden chain, and in the desire of the mind to dwell on it forever.

The ideal, in a word, is the height of the pleasing, that which satisfies and accords with the inmost longing of the soul: the picturesque is merely a sharper and bolder impression of reality.

A morning mist drawing a slender veil over all objects is at once picturesque and ideal;

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.

There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

There is nothing in the recollection that at a certain time we were not come into the world that “the gorge rises at”—why should we revolt at the idea that we must one day go out of it?

To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.

It is rather a relief and disburdening of the mind: it seems to have been holiday-time with us then: we were not called to appear upon the stage of life, to wear robes or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooted or applauded;

“O! thou strong heart! There’s such a covenant ’twixt the world and thee They’re loth to break!”

The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle.

Simply to be does not “content man’s natural desire”: we long to be in a certain time, place, and circumstance.

neither are we willing to give up our present mode of life, with all its advantages and disadvantages, for any other that could be substituted for it. No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate.

We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

There are some persons of that reach of soul that they would like to live two hundred and fifty years hence, to see to what height of empire America will have grown up in that period, or whether the English constitution will last so long.

These are points beyond me. But I confess I should like to live to see the downfall of the Bourbons. That is a vital question with me; and I shall like it the better, the sooner it happens!

No young man ever thinks he shall die.

He may believe that others will, or assent to the doctrine that “all men are mortal” as an abstract proposition, but he is far enough from bringing it home to himself individually.

We do not want to rip up old grievances, nor to renew our youth like the phoenix, nor to live our lives twice over.

Once is enough. As the tree falls, so let it lie.

Shut up the book and close the account once for all!

I should like to leave some sterling work behind me. I should like to have some friendly hand to consign me to the grave. On these conditions I am ready, if not willing, to depart. I shall then write on my tomb—Grateful and Contented!

But I have thought and suffered too much to be willing to have thought and suffered in vain.

—In looking back, it sometimes appears to me as if I had in a manner slept out my life in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where I have fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures, and only heard …

the naked map of life is spread out before me, and in the emptiness and desolation I see Death coming to meet me.

In my youth I could not behold him for the crowd of objects and feelings, and Hope stood always between us, saying, “Never mind that old fellow!”

If I had lived indeed, I should not care to die. But I do not like a contract of pleasure broken off unfulfilled, a marriage with joy unconsummated, a promise of happiness rescinded.

So in reflecting on death generally, we mix up the idea of life with it, and thus make it the ghastly monster it is.

We think, how we should feel, not how the dead feel.

“Still from the tomb the voice of nature cries; Even in our ashes live their wonted fires!”

But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our lifetime. The million are devoid of sentiment, and care as little for you or me as if we belonged to the moon.

We live the week over in the Sunday’s paper, or are decently interred in some obituary at the month’s end!

It is not surprising that we are forgotten so soon after we quit this mortal stage; we are scarcely noticed while we are on it.

The million are devoid of sentiment, and care as little for you or me as if we belonged to the moon. We live the week over in the Sunday’s paper, or are decently interred in some obituary at the month’s end!

It is not surprising that we are forgotten so soon after we quit this mortal stage; we are scarcely noticed while we are on it.

It is not merely that our names are not known in China—they have hardly been heard of in the next street. We are hand and glove with the universe, and think the obligation is mutual. This is an evident fallacy.

we are scarcely noticed while we are on it. It is not merely that our names are not known in China—they have hardly been heard of in the next street.

We are hand and glove with the universe, and think the obligation is mutual.

This is an evident fallacy. If this, however, does not trouble us now, it will not hereafter.

Even in the same family the gap is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect. Nay, our room is not unfrequently thought better than our company.

People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished.

While we were living, the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because it contributed to them.

and, after its short date, they hardly leave a name behind them.

“A great man’s memory may, at the common rate, survive him half a year.”

His heirs and successors take his titles, his power, and his wealth—all that made him considerable or courted by others; and he has left nothing else behind him either to delight or benefit the world.

In the still-life of a man of letters there was no obvious reason for a change. He might sit in an armchair and pour out cups of tea to all eternity. Would it had been possible for him to do so!

The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

If we merely wish to continue on the scene to indulge our headstrong humours and tormenting passions, we had better begone at once;