Quotes · page 1619

Over my head his arm he flung Against the world.

When men are reasonable enough to follow their natural instincts, they will unite across the frontiers and constitute the Cosmos.

In India, the bourgeois, in Japan, the Samurai; in this single difference is comprised the whole contrasted histories of the two nations during the nineteenth century.

A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

In secret we met In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years,

Thespis, the first professor of our art, At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.

Slavery has left behind it a spirit that still delights in human blood. Outrage, murder, and assassination are the inheritance of the freed men and women of the South. Neither our government nor our civilization seems able to stop the flow …

This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier.

Against destiny I fulfilled my duty . Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.

"What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

I believe there is a new order coming for the people of this country. It is a quiet but certain revolution.

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl?

On you, my lord, with anxious fear I wait, And from your judgment must expect my fate.

Sweet the rose which lives in Heaven, Although on earth ’tis planted, Where its honours blow, While by earth’s slaves the leaves are riven Which die the while they glow.

Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury …

True readers … are ready to go through a whole volume, if there be but hope of finding in it a single genuine thought or the mere suggestion even of a truth which has some fresh application to life.

Yet fill my glass: give me one kiss: My own sweet Alice, we must die. There's somewhat in this world amiss Shall be unriddled by and by. There's somewhat flows to us in life, But more is taken quite away.

Mohammed spoke some wonderful truths.

I suppose, to use our national motto, something will turn up.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even—if need be—to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade …

Sweet childish days, that were as long As twenty days are now.