171 quotes
All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much. All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.
Elsie Venner (1859)
Storms, thunders, waves!
Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill;
Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still
But in their graves.
Daily Trials by a Sensitive Man (1830)
It is not often that an opinion is worth expressing, which cannot take care of itself.
Where go the poet's lines?
Answer, ye evening tapers!
Ye auburn locks, ye golden curls,
Speak from your folded papers!
Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
And since, I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
I never dare to write
As funny as I can.
The Height of the Ridiculous (1852)
Most persons have died before they expire, — died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)
We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin. We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.
Elsie Venner (1859)
It went to pieces all at once—
All at once and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Scarce one tall frigate walks the sea
Or skirts the safer shores
Of all that bore to victory
Our stout old Commodores.
The flowering moments of the mind
Drop half their petals in our speech.
The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow.
Elsie Venner (1859)
One unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above;
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it—God is love.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Faith, as an intellectual state, is self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1859)
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.
Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels
When the tired player shuffles off the buskin;
A page of Hood may do a fellow good
After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin.
Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing seems real except what is unreal.