85 quotes
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man's self to himself!
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
Essays of Elia (1823)
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
Essays of Elia (1823)
A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.
Essays of Elia (1823)
Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.
Hester (1803)
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!
If dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
Essays of Elia (1823)
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.
Essays of Elia (1823)
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.
Essays of Elia (1823)
A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)
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.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
Essays of Elia (1823)