19th-century Biographer Quotes

Mary Shelley
Mihajlo Pupin
James Anthony Froude
Richard Garnett
Augustus Hare
Edward John Trelawny
Hartley Coleridge

I do not believe that the deeper problems of living can ever be answered by the process of thought. I believe that life itself teaches us either patience with regard to them, or reveals to us possible solutions when our hearts are pressed close against duties and sorrows and experiences of all kinds.

No man can be satisfied with his attainment, although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.

March we forth in the strength of God
With the banner of Christ unfurled,
That the light of the glorious gospel of truth
May shine throughout the World.

Alfred Ainger
Alfred Ainger
We would never get away from it.... It's bad enough as it is, but with the wireless telephone one could be called up at the opera, in church, in our beds. Where could one be free from interruption?

Mihajlo Pupin
Mihajlo Pupin
The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.

The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.

Were Love exempt from the militations of Necessity, he were greater than God and the World.

Richard Garnett
Richard Garnett
O, saw ye the lass wi' the bonnie blue een?
Her smile is the sweetest that ever was seen,
Her cheek like the rose is, but fresher, I ween,
She 's the loveliest lassie that trips on the green.

Western humor…grew out of a distinct condition—the battle with the frontier.… It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it.

In my youth I loved climbing and scrambling up rocks and mountains: now I seldom intrude on the dweller of a second story, and my greatest enemy or friend may avoid me altogether on the third; so humbled is the aspiring spirit of my youth.

Edward John Trelawny
Edward John Trelawny
I eat till, honest, I felt every button on all my clo'es. The folks where we were stayin' were the old-fashioned hospitable kind; they didn't let you off till your jaws struck work and wouldn't wag no more.

Laura E. Richards
Laura E. Richards
For mothers who must earn, there is indeed no leisure time problem. The long hours of earning are increased by the hours of domestic labor, until no slightest margin for relaxation or change of thought remains.

Katharine Anthony
Katharine Anthony
The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

Carl Van Doren
Carl Van Doren
When people are old enough to know better they are old enough to do worse.

When we advance a little into life, we find that the tongue of man creates nearly all the mischief of the world.

You know how some people are - they always feel they have to do things for other people's good, no matter what happens to the other people in the process!

Lincoln's removal from New Salem to Springfield and his entrance into a law partnership with Major John T. Stuart begin a distinctively new period in his career.

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

When will the dead world cease to dream,
When will the morning break?

If you trace up Masonry, through all its Orders, till you come to the grand tip-top head Mason of the World, you will discover that the dread individual and the Chief of the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Superior General of the Jesuit Order] are one and the same person.

The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.

I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness...

All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Between the villages of Aubiere and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation.

Shakespeare's relations with men and women of the court involved him at the outset in emotional conflicts, which form the subject-matter of his 'Sonnets'