Quotes from Washington Irving

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence.

To look upon its grass grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.

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.

Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.

No man knows what the wife of his bosom is until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world.

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.

There is an enduring tenderness in the love of a mother to a son that trancends all other affections of the heart