19th-century Biographer Quotes

Mary Shelley

Mihajlo Pupin

James Anthony Froude

Richard Garnett

Augustus Hare

Edward John Trelawny

Hartley Coleridge

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.

The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision.

Hartley Coleridge

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

The necessitarian falls back upon the experienced reality of facts.

James Anthony Froude

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

Richard Garnett

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

The business of a boys' author is not to consider political issues, but to entertain the readers, make them as happy as possible.

Charles Hamilton (writer)

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'

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.

I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?

John Lancaster Spalding

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

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

Hesketh Pearson

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.

Albert Bigelow Paine

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.

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.

Van Wyck Brooks

The question is not whether a doctrine is beautiful but whether it is true. When we wish to go to a place, we do not ask whether the road leads through a pretty country, but whether it is the right road.

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?

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

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...

Anne Gilchrist (writer)

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!

Frances Parkinson Keyes

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.

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 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.

Hamilton Wright Mabie

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

Edwin Paxton Hood