Quotes by 19th-century Women

The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.

Elizabeth Kenny
Elizabeth Kenny
I send thee pansies while the year is young,
Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night;
Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung
By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light.

There are times when sympathy is as necessary as the air we breathe.

Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix
Men trade unionists are accused of sex privilege and prejudice … A belief in the divine right of every man to his job is not peculiar to kings and capitalists, and men in organised trades are not disposed to share these advantages with a host of women competitors.

The light died out and left the sky,
We sighed and rose and said good-bye,
We had forgotten — He and I,
That he was dead, that I must die.

I want to dance always, to be good and not evil, and when it is all over not to have the feeling that I might have done better.

Ruth St. Denis
Ruth St. Denis
The genuine Anarchist looks with sheer horror upon every destruction, every mutilation of a human being, physical or moral. He loathes wars, executions and imprisonments, the grinding down of the worker's whole nature in a dreary round of toil, the sexual and economic slavery of women, the oppression of children, the crippling and poisoning of human nature by the preventable cruelty and injustice of man to man in every shape and form.

They sat and combed their beautiful hair,
Their long, bright tresses, one by one,
As they laughed and talked in the chamber there,
After the revel was done.

What's the use of praying for a thing, if when it comes, you won't take it?

Frances Harper
Frances Harper
There are so many New Yorks that you can always find the special one that fits your special pattern.

In times of uncertainty, wait. Always, if you have any doubt, wait. Do not force yourself to any action. If you have a restraint in your spirit, wait until all is clear, and do not go against it.

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian.

I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!

The white man had come with the Bible in one hand, the bottle in the other.

E. Pauline Johnson
E. Pauline Johnson
While working among the little plants of the far places of the world we forget the narrowness of our own orbit.

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
It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

Though I were gifted with an angel's tongue,
And voice like that with which the prophets sung,
Yet if mild charity were not within,
'T were all an impious mockery and sin.

Lucretia Maria Davidson
Lucretia Maria Davidson
The old creep out at the churchyard gate, while the young bound in at the front door.

We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.

Mourning Dove (author)
Mourning Dove (author)
It is not, in fact, cookery books that we need half so much as cooks really trained to a knowledge of their duties.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

It is also possible, I believe, if one lives in India long enough, to come across a globe-trotter who is modest and teachable, but we have been out here only twenty-two years, and I am going home without having seen one.