19th-century Author Quotes

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

Mathilde Blind
Mathilde Blind
Her beauty, passive in despair, Through sand and seaweed shone, The fairest jelly-fish I e'er Had set mine eyes upon. It would have made a stone abuse The callousness of fate, This creature of prismatic hues, Stranded and desolate!

What's lost upon the roundabouts we pulls up on the swings!

A fine morning's killing, ay! All their necks wrung - all dead birds! Once they could fly - fly and swim! Fly and swim! All dead now - and sold cheap in the open market!

There's Conservatives an' they want to make things better by keepin' 'em jus' like what they are now. An' there's Lib'rals an' they want to make things better by alterin' them jus' a bit, but not so's anyone'd notice, an' there's communists an' they want to make things better by killin' everyone but themselves.

Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton
The dust comes secretly day after day,
Lies on my ledge and dulls my shining things.
But O this dust that I shall drive away
Is flowers and Kings,
Is Solomon's temple, poets, Nineveh.

Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

Through reason Russia can't be known,
No common yardstick can avail you:
She has a nature all her own —
Have faith in her, all else will fail you.

Fyodor Tyutchev
Fyodor Tyutchev
Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

The diseases and "evils which flesh is heir to," are all the messengers of God, to rebuke us for our sins, and ought so to be regarded.

Adventure must be held in delicate fingers. It should be handled, not embraced. It should be sipped, not swallowed at a gulp.

The true Chameleon is small, A lizard sort of thing; He 'asn't any ears at all, And not a single wing. If there is nothing on the tree, 'Tis the Chameleon you see.

Hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as a Pharaoh in its tomb.

This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.

Acorns may be food for hogs or rise into magnificent oaks, as the dice of chance decree.

Physical science reads through its sense of touch like a blind man, and the supply of books in braille type on the spiritual life is very small.

Austin O'Malley
Austin O'Malley
I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.

Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner
To die for one's great ideas is glorious — and easy. The horror is to outlive them. That is our worst capability.

The law of cause and effect does not hide in the realm of the unexpected when intelligent beings go looking for it.

Gertrude Atherton
Gertrude Atherton
The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Glasgow
The science of Nature initiates the human mind into the secret thoughts of Divinity.

But every road is tough to me
That has no friend to cheer it.

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature.... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

Oh — oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

Fannie Hurst
Fannie Hurst