Thomas Starr King Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Leaves are the Greek, flowers the Italian, phase of the spirit of beauty that reveals itself through the flora of the globe.

Thomas Starr King
Nature is hieroglyphic. Each prominent fact in it is like a type; its final use is to set up one letter of the infinite alphabet, and help us by its connections to read some statement or statute applicable to the conscious world.

Thomas Starr King
Be sure of the foundation of your life. Know why you live as you do. Be ready to give a reason for it. Do not, in such a matter as life, build an opinion or custom on what you guess is true. Make it a matter of certainty and science.

Thomas Starr King
A visit to New Hampshire supplies the most resources to a traveler, and confers the most benefit on the mind and taste, when it lifts him above mere appetite for wildness, ruggedness, and the feeling of mass and precipitous elevation, into a perception and love of the refined grandeur, the chaste sublimity, the airy majesty overlaid with tender and polished bloom, in which the landscape splendor of a noble mountain lies.

Thomas Starr King
The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color, is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

Thomas Starr King
By cultivating an interest in a few good books which contain the result of the toil or the quintessence of the genius of some of the most gifted thinkers of the world, we need not live on the marsh and in the mists. The slopes and ridges invite us.

Thomas Starr King
Going close to a great mountain is like going close to a powerfully painted picture; you see only the roughnesses, the blotches of paint, the coarsely contrasted hues, which at the proper distance alone are grouped into grandeur and mellowed into beauty.

Thomas Starr King
Architecture is a creation of the human intellect, adding to the stores of beauty in the world.

Thomas Starr King
The majesty of a mountain is determined by the outlines of its bulk; its expression depends on the distance, and the states of the air through which it is seen.

Thomas Starr King
The triumphs of English science over nature, the hiss of her engines, the whirl of her wheels, the roar of her factory drums, the crackle of her furnaces, the beat of her hammers, the vast and chronic toil that mines her treasures, affect him with no wonder and arouse no exultant thrill of partnership.

Thomas Starr King
The oak roars when a high wind wrestles with it; the beech shrieks; the elm sends forth a long, deep groan; the ash pours out moans of thrilling anguish.

Thomas Starr King
In rushing so fast as many of us do through the mountains, the mountains do not have time to come to us.

Thomas Starr King