19th-century Author Quotes

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!

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

Patrick R. Chalmers

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!

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.

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

An optimist … is a person who thinks the future is uncertain.

Ah, the whites! Their malignity and their omniscience—that was what made them terrifying!

As I heard the sweet lark sing
In the clear air of the day.

Samuel Ferguson

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

Here is wisdom: to love wine, beauty and the divine Spring. That is enough, the rest is worthless.

Théodore de Banville

God lead us past the setting of the sun
To wizard islands, of august surprise;
God make our blunders wise.

It takes more than a short holiday to get a real love of Nature; such a love as makes trees like human companions, and green the colour we look for everywhere we go.

But women who have lost their Faith Are angels who have lost their wings, And always have a nasty breath Of chemistry, and horrid things That go off when a lecturer rings His bell.

Walter Chalmers Smith

Between dusk and dawn many a head has turned white. Who can believe it? And mine has not changed on all this long journey.

Wilhelm Müller

As with gladness men of old
Did the guiding star behold.

William Chatterton Dix

One speck within vast star-space lying Awoke, arose, resumed its clothing, And crawled another day toward dying.

William Rose Benét

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to thee,
For those in peril on the sea.

William Whiting

I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The grey spires of Oxford
Against a pearl-grey sky;
My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.

Winifred Mary Letts

The mysterious power of harmony
Will expiate a heavy delusion
And tame a revolting desire.

Yevgeny Baratynsky

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.

Houses without personality are a series of walled enclosures with furniture standing around in them. Other houses are filled with things of little intrinsic value, even with much that is shabby and yet they have that inviting atmosphere...

Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.

I think his fate is rather like Humpty Dumpty's, quite as tragic and quite as impossible to put right.

On her husband, Oscar Wilde

Constance Lloyd

No mean woman can cook well. It calls for a generous spirit, a light hand, and a large heart.

Eden Phillpotts

I must go to the laboratory and look into a little matter of acids and salts and alkalis. I've burned a hole as big as a plate in the front of my chemistry apron, with hydrochloric acid. If the theory worked, I ought to be able to neutralize that hole with good strong ammonia, oughtn't I?