The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.

Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

Beholding heaven, and feeling hell.

We encourage one another in mediocrity.