Nov 12, 2007 23:58
My parents gave me an awesome book for Christmas 1999 - which would have been my Freshman year of college at R*I*T - "The Giant Book of American Quotations" (Gramercy Books; New York. 1988) Part of the awe of it is the categorical set-up :: One can look-up most any topic, find it by alphabetical order, and there be gifted a varying number of quotations weighted in or alluding to the topic! Soooooo cool :D ....
.... to a word nerd such as myself, anyways ;D
I felt an urge to post a few choice picks, at random.
Home
Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life.
~ Edgar A. Guest, "Home", in Gold-Foil Hammered from Popular Proverbs, 1934.
It takes a hundred men to make an encampment, but one woman can make a home.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll, "Woman", speech at Peoria, Illinois, April 29, 1870.
I have been very happy with my homes, but homes really are no more than the people who live in them.
~ Nancy Reagan, Nancy, 1980.
Our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth, the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecotes.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.
I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.
One face to the world, another at home, makes for misery.
~ Amy Vanderbilt, New Complete Book of Etiquette, 1963.
Humankind
Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
~ T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton", Four Quarters, 1935.
That is the vice - that no one feels himself called to act for man, but only as a fraction of man.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Man the Reformer", published in The Dial magazine, April, 1841.
Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience", Essays, Second Series, 1844.
One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.
~ Alexander Hamilton, in a speech at the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 22, 1787.
Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, entry written in 1842, Passages from the American Notebooks, 1868.
Man is not for defeat.
~ Ernest Hemingway, the Old Man and the Sea, 1952.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
~ Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 1961.
We are not really native to this world, except in respect to our bodies.
~ george Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay, 1931.
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
~ Attributed to Booker T. Washington.
Perception
An optimist sees opportunity in every calamity.
A pessimist sees calamity in every opportunity.
~ Anonymous.
All the world is queer but me and thee, dear; and sometimes I think thee is a little queer.
~ Attributed to a Quaker addressing his wife.
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
~ Diane Arbus, in Diane Arbus, 1972.
The world is his who can see through its pretension.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered August 31, 1837.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance", Essays, First Series, 1841.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles", Essays, First Series, 1841.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Art", Essays, First Series, 1841.
We must think things, not words.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1899, quoted in Catherine Brinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 1944.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923.
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
~ Henry David Thoreau, entry dated june 21, 1852, in his Journal, 1906.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
~ Barbara tuchman, The Guns of August, 1962.
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
~ Walt Whitman, "Miracles", 1881.
~
family,
travel,
social,
authors,
beliefs,
history,
writing,
-mondays,
relationships,
friends,
books,
letters,
humor,
house stuff,
knowledge,
earth,
wisdom,
quotes