Quotes About Author

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness with others

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch cold on over-exposure.

And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,Was beat with fist, instead of a stick.

For rhetoric, he could not opeHis mouth, but out there flew a trope.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Love is a boy by poets styled;Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

I'll make the furFly 'bout the ears of the old cur.

Cleric before, and Lay behind;A lawless linsey-woolsey brother,Half of one order, half another.

Loyalty is still the same,Whether it win or lose the gameTrue as a dial to the sun,Although it be not shined upon.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition. 

The difference between God and the historians consists above all in the fact that God cannot alter the past.

For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you'd have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen.

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence. His name, like a shuttlecock, must be beat backward and forward, or it falls to the ground.

Classical quotation is a parole of literary men all over the world.

The necessities of our condition require a thousand offices of tenderness, which mere regard for the species will never dictate.

No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.

Boswell: That, sir, was great fortitude of mind.Johnson: No, sir; stark insensibility.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

The father of English criticism.