Quote

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters--who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.

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
Like
Gains
Thereby
Divers
Letters
Forest
Shrubs
Animals
Maturity
Buds
Progress
Republic
Subsistence
Animal
Forests
Robbing
Upon
Gain
Bud
Young
Leaves
Goats
Retarding
Kind
Critics
Deer
Verdure

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I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.
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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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A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
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He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
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A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.
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Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
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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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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.
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The tongue is the only instrument that gets sharper with use.
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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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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.
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Washington, in fact, had very little private life, but was eminently a public character.
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There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse.
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Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.
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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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The dullest observer must be sensible of the order and serenity prevalent in those households where the occasional exercise of a beautiful form of worship in the morning gives, as it were, the keynote to every temper for the day, and attunes every spirit to harmony.
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