21 quotes
The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.
Table-Talk (1851)
Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
The two divinest things this world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot!
The Story of Rimini (1816)
Write me as one who loves his fellow men.
If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation, introduce the subject of eating.
Table-Talk (1851)
With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks
To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.
The Story of Rimini (1816)
That there is pain and evil, is no rule
That I should make it greater, like a fool.
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I'm growing old, but add
Jenny kissed me.
His lady to remove the toll that makes the land forlorn,
Will surely ride through Coventry, naked as she was born.
Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,
Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
The world was all forgot, the struggle o’er,
Desperate the joy.—
That day they read no more.
The Story of Rimini (1816)
Yon second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures which he dispenses.
Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner.
If you become a Nun, dear,
The bishop Love will be;
The Cupids every one, dear!
Will chant—'We trust in thee!'
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
Patience and Gentleness is Power.
It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands.
Foliage (1818)
. . . and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.
Foliage (1818)
The closeness of their intercourse [the intercourse of nations] will assuredly render war as absurd and impossible by-and-by, as it would be for Manchester to fight with Birmingham, or Holborn Hill with the Strand.
Fishes do not roar; they cannot express any sound of suffering; and therefore the angler chooses to think they do not suffer, more than it is convenient for him to fancy. Now it is a poor sport that depends for its existence on the want of a voice in the sufferer, and of imagination in the sportsman.
The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events (1848)