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Man passes away his name perishes from record and recollection his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

Washington Irving

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Washington Irving
Age: 76 †
Born: 1783
Born: April 3
Died: 1859
Died: November 28
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New York City
New York
Diedrich Knickerbocker
Geoffrey Crayon
Lauuncelot Langstaff
Men
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Names
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Tales

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Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.
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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.
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After all, it is the divinity within that makes the divinity without.
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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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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.
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It is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is irrepressible, unconfinable that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of a dungeon.
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Great minds have purposes others have wishes.
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There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees.
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The Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweet and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness.
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I've had it with you and your emotional constipation!
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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.
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Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.
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There was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was petticoat government.
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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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Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate.
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The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
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Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.
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An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
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The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.
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The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.
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