All Quotes

"Bibles laid open, millions of surprises."

"Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him."

"Wouldst thou both eat thy cake and have it?"

"Do well and right, and let the world sink."

"My meaning (dear Mother) is in these sonnets, to declare my resolution to be, that my poor abilities in poetry, shall be all and ever consecrated to God's glory."

"It (my book) is a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. (Maycock, A L, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. SPCK, London, 1938)"

"I have no ear."

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

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

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

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

"It is good to love the unknown."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"Presents, I often say, endear absents."

"It argues an insensibility."

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

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

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

"Books think for me."

"Things in books' clothing."

"Books which are no books."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 ..."

"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."

"I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself."

"The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water."

"Surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made druken with wormwood, I conjre you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven."

"Oaths fell from his mouth with a gentleness and sweetness which the blessings of other men cannot reach. His essays of Elia are full of this bright humour, this tender criticism. A ripple of tender laughter rips through them, just broke here and there by a sob."

"I am not a politician, and my other habits are good, also."

"The prevailin' weakness of most public men is to Slop over. G. Washington never slopt over."

"I can't sing. As a singist I am not a success. I am saddest when I sing. So are those who hear me. They are sadder even than I am."

"Did you ever have the measels, and if so, how many?"

"My wife is one of the best wimin on this continent, altho' she isn't always gentle as a lamb, with mint sauce."

"The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his."

"Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?"

"He is dreadfully married. "He's the most married man I ever saw in my life.""

"Let us all be happy and live within our means, even if we have to borrer [sic] money to do it with."

"The sun has a right to "set" where it wants to, and so, I may add, has a hen."

"They cherish his mem'ry, and them as sell picturs of his birthplace, etc., make it prof'tible cherishin' it."

"I now bid you a welcome adoo."

"...their eyes sparkled like diminds, their cheeks was like roses, and they was charmin enuff to make a man throw stuns at his granmother, if they axed him to."

"Hearto4, as I hav numerously obsarved, I have abstrained from having any sentimunts or principles, my pollertics, like my religion, bein of a exceedin accommodatin character. But the fack can't be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us, & I feel it's my dooty to accept your invite for one consecutive nite only."