Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
there is nothing so uncertain and slippery as fact.
February brings the rain, Thaws the frozen lake again.
January brings the snow, makes our feet and fingers glow.
Hot July brings cooling showers, Apricots and gillyflowers.
avarice is especially, I suppose, a disease of the imagination.
April brings the primrose sweet, / Scatters daisies at our feet.
Dull November brings the blast, Then the leaves are whirling fast.
Chill December brings the sleet, Blazing fire, and Christmas treat.
Fresh October brings the pheasant, Then to gather nuts is pleasant.
June brings tulips, lilies, roses, Fills the children's hands with posies.
The Poplar grows up straight and tall, The Pear-tree spreads along the wall
Life is the steam of the corporeal engine; the soul is the engineer who makes use of the steam-quickened engine.
I have a strong opinion that a genuine love of books is one of the greatest blessings of life for man and woman.
Religious bigotry is a dull fire - hot enough to roast an ox, but with no lambent, luminous flame shooting up from it.
It is remarkable what fine hands men of genius write, even when they are as awkward in all other uses of the hand as a cow with a musket.
The desire to be the object of public attention is weak, but the excessive dread of it is but a form of vanity and over-self-contemplativeness.
I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime accomplishment.
I very much wish that some day or other you may have time to learn Greek, because that language is an idea. Even a little of it is like manure to the soil of the mind, and makes it bear finer flowers.
Puns are often unacceptable to the feelings; they come like a spoonful of ice-cream in the midst of a comfortable smoking-hot steak, or as a peppery morsel when your palate was in expectation of a mild pudding.
Much waste of words and of thought too would be avoided if disputants would always begin with a clear statement of the question, and not proceed to argue till they had agreed upon what it was that they were arguing about.
bubbles of false opinion will last whole ages, and deceive whole generations, till they are broken by some powerful breath, and even then how often they reunite, and again shine in the eyes of men, who hold them solid as cannon-balls!
Parents and children cannot be to each other, as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and forty.
I don't pretend to any exemption from the general lot of parental delusion-I mean that like most other parents I see my child through an atmosphere which illuminates, magnifies, and at the same time refines the object to a degree that amounts to a delusion.
The death of my mother permanently affects my happiness, more even than I should have anticipated, though I always knew that I must feel the separation at first as a severe wrench. But I did not apprehend, during her life, to what a degree she prevented me from feeling heart-solitude.
When I read or hear of the mutual injuries of England and Ireland, I fancy it would have been a blessed thing had the sea never flowed between the two countries. Had they been all in one, surely there would have been more unity between them of interests and of feelings. But let us hope that days of peace and general enlightenment will arrive by ways past man's finding out.