Quotes

And you call yourselves pillars of society!

Our house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.

She knew well she was to give me All or Nothing!

Turn to the Jewish nation, the nobility of the human race. How has it preserved itself—isolated, poetical—despite all the barbarity from without? Because it had no state to burden it. Had the Jewish nation remained in Palestine, it would long since have been ruined in the process of construction, like all the other nations.

I have always been Darwin’s bulldog.

[ Replying to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in their debate on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Oxford, England, 30 June 1860 :] A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man —a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

Truly it has been said, that to a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be seen.

My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the “Origin” [Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species ], was, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organised common sense , differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?

[ Describing a mescaline-induced experience :] I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers—what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!

“If you look up ‘Intelligence’ in the new volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ,” he had said, “you’ll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather’s a present specimen of Intelligence, Military.”

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.

In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave , and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercis’d more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities, with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means, which she affords to the relieving these necessities.

On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées .

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young woman, it is boldness.

Le mot, c’est le Verbe, et le Verbe, c’est Dieu .

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

Les États Unis d’Europe .

Asile!

Oh! que ne suis-je de pierre comme toi!

Stilled legendary depth:

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

Pike, three inches long, perfect

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Grey silent fragments

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

“It’s powerful,” he said.

As I learn from you,

I swear to the Lord

Hold fast to dreams

They’ll see how beautiful I am

It is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!”

A genius is a man who takes the lemons that Fate hands him and starts a lemonade-stand with them.

[President William] McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter & did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze & the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—” Carry a message to Garcia!”

Ille potens sui

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero .

Multa fero, ut placem genus irritabile vatum .