Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.
Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
Tis easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue-- 'Tis the natural way of living.
It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous.
Of my merit On that pint you yourself may jedge: All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.
He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!
Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.
Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame; Ev'y thin' thet' s done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same.
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.
The right to be a cussed fool Is safe from all devices human, It's common (ez a gin'I rule) To every critter born of woman.
The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us.
I tell ye wut, my judgment is you're pooty sure to fail, Ez long 'z the head keeps turnin' back for counsel to the the tail.
Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.
There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.
Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go; At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow.
The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.
The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.
Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?
All that hath been majestical In life or death, since time began, Is native in the simple heart of all, The angel heat of man.
The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.
Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
Freedom needs all her poets; it is they Who give her aspirations wings, And to the wiser law of music sway Her wild imaginings.
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.
Winds wanders, and dews drip earthward; Rains fall, suns rise and set; Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then
Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.
There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.
God is not dumb, that he should speak no more; If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.
Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.
The flowers or weeds that spring up tomorrow are in the seeds we sow today. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
But better far it is to speak One simple word, which now and then Shall waken their free nature in the weak And friendless sons of men.
The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change... [Truth's] mirror is turned forward, to reflect The promise of the future, not the past.
An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.
From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature's text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature.
Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it.