Samuel Laman Blanchard quotes - page 2

Everybody is seldom to be believed. "They say" is not proof that they know. On dit is French for a fib. (Samuel Laman Blanchard)
As with the tender juvenile, who sets light to his frock, so with the sweet senior, who sets his fortunes on fire. Even in his maturer time, in his state of cinderhood, he still craves to be further consumed. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events-that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." ...In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
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. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
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. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
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. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
Two words of such a book, though possessing no peculiar signification, if met with in the dullest sentence, are enough: they call up, what has been finely termed, the "lightning of the mind." We feel an instantaneous kindness and reverence towards an author (together with a high opinion of his discrimination) who cites as it were the very language of our dreams-the secret converse of our own invisible spirit. We are almost startled at its being made public, and fancy that we have been at some time overheard reading. He is forthwith admitted a member of our heart's privy council. His hard words and bad reasoning are forgiven: we shut our ears to his angular periods-remembering only that his habits and desires, his sympathies, perceptions and enjoyments, are under the same master-key as our own-that he has struck into the same path, drank at the same brook, mused upon the same bank, and plucked almost the same leaf with ourselves. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture-a Claude or Titian, for example. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
Forewarned, forearmed, is sheer nonsense. Who is so indefatigable a scribbler as your abundantly damned author? Which of our orators speak so long and so often as he whom nobody listens to? What actors are so constantly before the public as those whom the town will not go to see? Who so easy to deceive as the dupe who has been taken in all his days? The gamester is a legitimate child of that frail couple, Flesh and Blood; he loses a fourth of what he is worth at the first throw-esteems himself lucky if he loses less today than he did yesterday-goes on staking and forfeiting hour by hour-and parts with his last guinea by exactly the same turn of the dice which lost him his first. Experience leaves fools as foolish as ever. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
None are so easily taken in as the "knowing ones." The knowing one is generally an egregious ninny. The man who loses his last shilling at Doncaster, is no other than he who was sure of winning; who could prove by his betting-book that he must win by backing Chaff against the field. He is a fine specimen of the family of Oldbirds. So is the careful, cautious wight, the original Master Surecard, the man of many savings, who in his old age falls in love with a loan; who dies in prison from the pressure of foreign bonds, or drowns himself in the new canal by way of securing what he calls his share. The genuine old bird is a pigeon. View quote
Samuel Laman Blanchard
There is an instinct that leads a listener to be very sparing of credence when a fact is communicated; it doesn't ring well in his ears-it has too much or too little gloss; he receives it with a shrug, and passes it on with a huge notch in it to show how justly it is entitled to suspicion; he is not to be imposed upon by a piece of truth. But give him a fable fresh from the mint of the Mendacity Society-an on dit of the first water-and he will not only make affidavit of its truth, but will call any man out who ventures to dispute its authenticity. (Samuel Laman Blanchard)