Thomas Wentworth Higginson Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
When a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud a heroic deed.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
There are no days in the whole round year more delicious than those which often come to us in the latter half of April... The sun trembles in his own soft rays... The grass in the meadow seems all to have grown green since yesterday... though there is warmth enough for a sense of luxury, there is coolness enough for exertion.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
In ancient Boeotia brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in token, that they would never again be needed.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me, and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Many persons sigh for death when it seems far off, but the inclination vanishes when the boat upsets, or the locomotive runs off the track, or the measles set it.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
But days even earlier than these in April have a charm, — even days that seem raw and rainy.... There is a fascination in walking through these bare early woods, — there is such a pause of preparation, winter's work is so cleanly and thoroughly done. Everything is taken down and put away.... All else is bare, but prophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summer concentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough...

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
God offers us yearly a necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June, and cast the rest aside.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn, — its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveliness is the fairest.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence. As Ruskin wrote in his earlier and better days, "No weight nor mass nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson
There is certainly no defense or water-proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor. The man who has it can rarely be cast down for a great while by external events; and it is much the same with a nation.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson