The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus
No one respects a talent that is concealed.
Concealed talent brings no reputation.
It's the generally accepted privilege of theologians to stretch the heavens, that is the Scriptures, like tanners with a hide.
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.
You'll see certain Pythagorean whose belief in communism of property goes to such lengths that they pick up anything lying about unguarded, and make off with it without a qualm of conscience as if it had come to them by law.
Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.
If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
Lord (George Gordon) Byron
Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality. And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
In solitude, where we are least alone.
The busy have no time for tears.
The Cardinal is at his wit's end -- it is true that he had not far to go.
All are inclined to believe what they covet, from a lottery-ticket up to a passport to Paradise.
Dreading that climax of all human ills the inflammation of his weekly bills.
Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days -- whatever there may be for the dust -- the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.
The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, -- there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion.
The lapse of ages changes all things -- time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.
Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.
For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.
The power of thought, the magic of the mind.
Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead, adorer of the ruin, comforter and only healer when the heart hath bled... Time, the avenger!
I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.
I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.
Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life -- and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.
The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch.
Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons.
What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.
Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; -- all this comes of Authorship.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
No more we meet in yonder bowers Absence has made me prone to roving; But older, firmer hearts than ours, Have found monotony in loving.
So much alarmed that she is quite alarming, All Giggle, Blush, half Pertness, and half Pout.
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, is much more common where the climate's sultry.
And yet a little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an adventure of any lively description.
It is odd but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and sets me up for a time.
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