💬 Quotes

"Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, though no one would think so to hear the people talk, there was a shepherd on the Downs."

"If you mix up Reason with emotion, be very sure you will only make a mess."

"Children and fools are always right, up to the date of their experience, but dead wrong afterwards."

"We are not quite the only people in England, though we are pretty busy."

"A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions."

"All England is waking, and where the church towers are you could see, if you were high enough, that England is full of people who have been asleep."

"It is impossible to express the general consternation of the poor people at this calamity; for as we were brought to the last extremity, it was not the plague only that afflicted them, but an absolute want of all things, especially of work."

"People began now to be sensible of their danger, and to reflect seriously upon their past lives; and indeed the dreadful terror of the disease made so strange an impression upon their minds that I think I never saw people more reformed."

"In these terrible cases, human natures are rendered frantic and desperate; and many appear to be the proper objects of just terror to themselves, and to abandon all humanity."

"Never was such a time or place known in these nations; hunger and thirst for bread and water was not so much the cry, as for life and health; and for those who were sick, for physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries."

"The face of London was now indeed strangely altered; I mean the whole mass of buildings, city, liberties, suburbs, Westminster, Southwark, and altogether: for all sorts of carriages and horses ceased to appear."

"A plague is a formidable enemy which it is scarce possible for a great city to bear up under; and though it cannot be said that all the inhabitants died, yet the greater part of them died morally, by their abandoning all care of themselves."

"Hardly any man gets a small income honestly without some trouble, and with a large income the trouble is generally greater."

"It is so hard to believe that one is going to be ruined until the ruin has actually come."

"We are all apt to believe that our own sorrows are greater than those of other people."

"A man should not put his name to a bit of stamped paper unless he has the wherewithal to meet it when it falls due."

"Success in the world does not depend so much on merit, or even on talent, as on happy timing and connection."

"There is no purgatory so dreary as that in which a man waits for the results of his own folly."

"Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall."

"Mercy is not itself that oft looks so; Pardon is still the nurse of second woe."