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For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.

Washington Irving

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Washington Irving
Age: 76 †
Born: 1783
Born: April 3
Died: 1859
Died: November 28
Author
Biographer
Diplomat
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Playwright
Politician
Writer
New York City
New York
Diedrich Knickerbocker
Geoffrey Crayon
Lauuncelot Langstaff
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Nature
Page
Human
Industriously
Humans
Pages
Libel
Species
Infamy
Honor
Monument
Huge
Volume
Rather
Holding
History

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One point is certain, that truth is one and immutable until the jurors all agree, they cannot all be right.
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Christmas is here, Merry old Christmas, Gift-bearing Christmas, Day of grand memories, King of the year!
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I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.
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Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.
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The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
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I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortunes.
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The oil and wine of merry meeting.
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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.
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A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man because love is more the study and business of her life.
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Believe me, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, eats oftener a sweeter morsel, however coarse, than he who procures it by the labor of his brains.
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It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.
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Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature.
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Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.
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Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint.
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Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple-pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks - a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, except in genuine Dutch families.
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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.
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Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.
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True love will not brook reserve it feels undervalued and outraged, when even the sorrows of those it loves are concealed from it.
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There is no character in the comedy of human life more difficult to play well than that of an old bachelor.
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To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea-voyage is full of subjects for meditation but then they are the wonders of the deep and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes.
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