Quotes from Washington Irving

And if unhappy in her love, her heart is like some fortress that has been captured, and sacked, and abandoned, and left desolate...

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.

The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.

after a man passes 60 , his mischief is mainly in his head

The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.

Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

It's a fair wind that blew men to ale.

History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.

No man knows what the wife of his bosom is until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world.

The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion.

The almighty dollar that great object of universal devotion throughout our land seems to have no genuine devotees in these peculiar villages.

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.

There is an enduring tenderness in the love of a mother to a son that trancends all other affections of the heart

A mother is the truest friend we have when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity.

A mother is the truest friend we have.

A father may turn his back on his child, … . but a mother's love endures through all.

There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery that enters into the soul and delights and elevates it, and fills it with noble inclinations.

He who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.

Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear legitimate dulness to maturity; and to glory in the vigour and luxuriance of her chance productions.

A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.