Samuel Laman Blanchard Quotes

#1. For the author there is nothing but his pen, till that and life are worn to the stump: and then, with good fortune, perhaps on his death-bed he receives a pension and equals, it may be, for a few months, the income of a retired butler!

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#2. Everybody's word is worth Nobody's taking.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#3. The ancient gentleman who has seen the world, who is profoundly experienced, and much too deep to be the dupe of an age so shallow as this, is to be won by an admiring glance at the brilliancy of his knee-buckle; praise his very pigtail, and you may lead him by it.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#4. When the error is universal, it is supposed to end. The adoption of the foundling establishes its consanguinity.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#5. It seems to me that, with but slight reserve and modification, we may apply to our departed friend his own pathetic and beautiful elegy upon another.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#6. The scarcity of truth is atoned for by the abundance of affidavits; if a rumor be impugned, its veracity is easily strengthened by additional emphasis of affirmation, until at last "everybody says so," and then it is undeniable.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#7. It is surely one of the strangest of our propensities to mark out those we love best for the worst usage; yet we do, all of us. We can take any freedom with a friend; we stand on no ceremony with a friend.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#8. Man will take anything you like, except warning.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#9. We feel bound to be punctual and conscientious with those we are indifferent about; while we can afford at any time, on the frostiest night, to be an hour after our appointment with the single gentleman who occupies an apartment in our heart's core.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#10. Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids?

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#11. How often does it happen that an obscure line finds its way into a periodical ... is requoted in every book that comes out during the next three months, and sleeps again!

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#12. Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#13. When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#14. Give me to live with Love alone And let the world go dine and dress; For Love hath lowly haunts ... If life's a flower, I choose my own 'T is "love in Idleness".

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#15. Social and political life is a Society for the Diffusion of Mendacity .

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#16. Pleasures lie thickest where no pleasures seem: There's not a leaf that falls upon the ground But holds some joy of silence or of sound, Some spirits begotten of a summer dream.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#17. It is an odd mode of diminishing one's own weakness to ask a friend to lend us the equal force of his.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#18. What if two negatives make an affirmative ... does it follow that two nobodies shall be some body?

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#19. As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and nothing is but what is not.

Samuel Laman Blanchard