"A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative."

"Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it ..."

"Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations."

"I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty."

"From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me."

"If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance."

"The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture."

"A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return."

"A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."

"Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it."

"How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty."

"Books which are no books."

"Things in books' clothing."

"Books think for me."

"When I am not walking, I am reading;"

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds."

"A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature."

"It argues an insensibility."

"Presents, I often say, endear absents."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"It is good to love the unknown."

"Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door."

"Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength."

"I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair."

"Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune."

"I have no ear."

"A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game."

"I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!"

"Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes."

"The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend."

"For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord."

"The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days."

"Stinking’st of the stinking kind, Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, Africa, that brags her foyson, Breeds no such prodigious poison, Henbane, nightshade, both together, Hemlock, aconite—"

"Thou through such a mist dost show us, That our best friends do not know us."

"Thou in such a cloud dost bind us, That our worst foes cannot find us, And ill fortune, that would thwart us, Shoots at rovers, shooting at us; While each man, through thy height'ning steam, Does like a smoking Etna seem."

"No one can say farewell with indifference."

"Of the gifted being whose career, intimately blended for nearly twenty years with my own in every intellectual and literary pursuit, it is my inevitable task to describe, I cannot write in a language addressed to common minds or submitted to mere worldly rules. I must appeal to the feeling and the imaginative; for such was L. E. L. She cannot be understood by an ordinary estimate nor measured by an ordinary standard; and those who have not poetry in their souls and warm and deep sympathies in their natures, will find little to interest them in this portion of my work. .... I found in L. E. L. a creature of another sphere, though with every fascination which could render her most loveable in our every-day world. The exquisite simplicity of childhood, the fine form of womanhood, the sweetest of dispositions, the utmost charm of unaffected manners, and, above all, an impassioned ideal and poetical temperament which absorbed her existence and held all else comparatively as nothing. The development of this Psyche-phenomenon was her life, and all that pertained to it. Her whole history realised the allegory, if it be an allegory, of Apuleius, as closely as if it had been invented to shape her course, with the exception of its fatal termination on earth—death instead of slumber;"

"Within thy passion-haunted pages Throng forward girls and distant ages, The lifeless learns at once to live, The dumb grows strangely talkative, Resemblances begin to strike In things exceedingly unlike, All nouns, like statesmen, suit all places, And verbs, turned lawyers, hunt for cases."

"I know not who, or what thou art; Nor do I seek to know thee, While Thou, performing thus thy part, Such banquets canst bestow me. Then be, as long as thou shalt list, My viewless, nameless Melodist."

"[From Castuccio]"

"[From Arrezi]"

"[From Castruccio]"

"[From Cesario]"

"I do not believe that affection can exist with truth, without the ideal, and without blending with itself all that is best and most earnest in our nature."

"The history of most fictions would be far stranger than the fictions themselves ; but it would be a dark and sad chronicle. Half the works that constitute the charm of our leisure, that give their own interest to the long November evening, or add to the charm of a summer noon beneath the greenwood tree, are the offspring of poverty and of pain. ... How often is the writer obliged to put his own trouble, his suffering, or his sorrow aside, to finish the task ! The hand may tremble, the eyes fill with unbidden tears, and the temples throb with feverish pain, yet how often is there some hard and harsh necessity, which says, "the work must be done.”"

"A gay temper is like a bright day ; true, it may have its faults — a little petulance, a little wilfulness — the flush may be too ready in the cheek, and the flash too prompt in the eye ; still these are only trifles to be pardoned, and we like that all the better in which we have something to forgive."

"Youth is frank, eager, and prone to believe in the good ; it looks round, and it sees flowers ; it looks up and sees stars ; evil appears impossible, because it does not seem to be in ourselves. It remains for after and weary years to teach us, that even the young and the innocent may be led into crime by the strong influence of temptation. Passion first, and interest afterwards, lures the feet of men into dark and crooked paths, which none in earlier and holier hours deemed they could tread. We may have been often deceived, but it is not until we ourselves begin to deceive that we dread deceit."

"It is not in the calm and measured paths of to day that we see the more bold and pronounced characters, whose outlines have been rough-hewn by the strong hand of necessity ; yet to such troubled times often belong the development of our noblest and best qualities — the stormy gulf of Ormus throws up the finest pearls. It is not in the season of tranquility that we know aught of the generous devotion, the fertility of resource, and the forgetfulness of self often shown in the hour of trial. When the French revolution broke out, how many, only accustomed to indolence, luxury, and custom, showed that "there was iron in the rose ;" and, whether at the call of duty or of affection, were prepared to bear even to the uttermost, and to exert a fortitude till then undreamed of."