Irish novelist & dramatist (1800-1867)
Every house is built after a plan of its own: one looks in, another looks out; one is tall, another broad; and they are so irregular in height and outline that they seem as if they were all getting up out of bed at different hours in the morning, some not being yet quite up, while others are yawning and stretching themselves.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
Men are always jealous of women who are superior to themselves.
ROBERT BELL
Hearts and Altars
The first hour of accomplished love is perhaps the only passage in a man's life with which he is perfectly satisfied. It is the only reality that does not disappoint the dream of expectation. There is no region of speculation beyond it--its horizon bounds the world.
ROBERT BELL
Hearts and Altars
Before marriage a woman may procure some éclat by pretending to believe in the fiction of her ascendancy; but after marriage, the worshipped beauty becomes a very plain every-day sort of person, and the poetry of the sex's power is at an end for ever!
ROBERT BELL
Marriage: A Comedy in Five Acts
Of all things in this world love is the most unmanageable. Parents and guardians are sadly foiled when they undertake to guide and coerce it: and the best thing they can do with it is to leave it to itself.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
It is not so much by any power inherent in himself that the magician works, as by the ductility of that material of gaping credulity upon which he operates.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
No man, by the mere force of his own genius, could effect revolutions of this description in society, if society did not place the divining rod in his hands, and voluntarily prostrate itself before the sorcery by which it is first dazzled and then duped.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
There is no way of accounting for the incongruities of architects. They have their dreams, we suppose, like the poets; and failing to establish a reputation by legitimate means, they seek notoriety by eccentricities.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
Great ends demand great means.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
At first, all wonder and curiosity, we are easily influenced by surrounding circumstances, which often affect our lives, as colours laid at the root of bulbous plants are said to transmit their tints to the blossom; next comes the age of knowledge, when reason struggles with passion, and is not always the victor; lastly, the decay, when passion is extinct, and we live from day to day on our memories, and then drop into dust.
ROBERT BELL
Hearts and Altars
People who travel only in their arm-chairs acquire notions of foreign places which reality usually upsets at the first glance.
ROBERT BELL
Wayside Pictures through France, Belgium, and Holland
Marriage is a serious undertaking. You must submit to family congratulations on certain events, and have a nursery at the top of the house. One doesn't know what a nursery may lead to.
ROBERT BELL
Marriage: A Comedy in Five Acts
Why is it that adults, as well as children, are impressed with a certain uneasiness in the dark? Not a fear of ghosts, or robbers, or accidents, or of anything upon which the mind can reason, or of which the senses are cognizant, but a vague consciousness of invisible influences. In the daylight we have no such sensations; they belong exclusively to silence and darkness.
ROBERT BELL
Hearts and Altars