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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
Honor
Infamy
Huge
Monument
Rather
Volume
History
Holding
Nature
Add
Human
Page
Humans
Pages
Industriously
Species
Libel
More quotes by Washington Irving
History fades into fable fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
Washington Irving
There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living.
Washington Irving
There is a sacredness in tears
Washington Irving
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.
Washington Irving
History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.
Washington Irving
They who drink beer will think beer.
Washington Irving
The oil and wine of merry meeting.
Washington Irving
The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion.
Washington Irving
The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.
Washington Irving
After all, it is the divinity within that makes the divinity without and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty.
Washington Irving
The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.
Washington Irving
To occupy an inch of dusty shelf-to have the title of their works read now and then in a future age by some drowsy churchman or casual straggler, and in another age to be lost, even to remembrance. Such is the amount of boasted immortality.
Washington Irving
By a kind of fashionable discipline, the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to emanate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness and good-will.
Washington Irving
A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.
Washington Irving
Villainy wears many masks none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
Washington Irving
Those who are well assured of their own standing are least apt to trespass on that of others, whereas nothing is so offensive as the aspirings of vulgarity which thinks to elevate itself by humiliating its neighbor.
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Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint.
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There is an enduring tenderness in the love of a mother to a son that trancends all other affections of the heart
Washington Irving
There is never jealousy where there is not strong regard.
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[I]n the gloomy month of February.... The Deserts of Arabia are not more dreary and inhospitable than the streets of London at such a time.
Washington Irving