19th-century Essayist Quotes

Use the talents God has given you to make the world better for your having been in it.

Robert Collier (author)

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

Singing is near miraculous because it is the mastering of what is otherwise a pure instrument of egotism: the human voice.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

[But if things continue the way they are]... the society that I envision, if my dream is not just a false notion, this society will have to begin to create itself in the midst of fuss, noisiness and panic, and will have to face the prospects of both internal and external war...

Science has but one fashion - to lose nothing once gained...

Edmund Clarence Stedman

Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.

The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.

Alexander Smith

What is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water?

Herman Melville

Children are born optimists and we slowly educate them out of their heresy

Louise Imogen Guiney

Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.