Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and t...he second reeked claret.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I consider how little of a rarity children are--that every street and blind alley swarms with them--that the poorest people c...ommonly have them in most abundance--that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains--how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc.--I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer b...ook.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have... done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles,--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheap'ning books, coffee houses, steam of soups from kitchens, pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,--all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, I often shed tears in the Strand from fullness of joy at so much life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print ... substitute d...runken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd- eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 me...n who lend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »