Quotes from the 1800s

The person we are as children shapes the adult we become. Wordsworth hopes his grown-up self will keep the wonder he felt as a child seeing a rainbow.

Austen's narrator states a “universal truth” that is really a joke: it is the families of single women who want a rich bachelor, not the bachelor who wants a wife.

Her beauty is like a clear, starry night, a perfect balance of dark and light, and it comes as much from a calm, good mind as from her face.

The first line of Keats's long poem Endymion: beautiful things never lose their power to delight us, and their loveliness grows over time instead of fading.

The urn tells us that beauty and truth are the same thing, and that this is the only wisdom people need. Whether Keats himself believed it, or is letting the urn speak for itself, is still debated.

Everyone, king or cobbler, feels something on New Year's Day, because it is the day from which we all count our time and reckon how much is left.

The opening of the poem that shaped the modern American Santa Claus: a jolly, round St. Nicholas who arrives on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer and comes down the chimney.

Beautiful things do not need a purpose to justify them. A flower blooming where no one sees it is reason enough in itself.

At a holiday gathering, don't dwell on what the year has taken from you. Count what you still have, because everyone has many blessings and every life has some sorrow.

Tiny Tim, a sick little boy from a poor family, asks God's blessing on everyone at the Christmas table. Dickens ends the whole book with it, turning a child's grace into a blessing on the reader.

Scrooge, shown his own lonely grave, promises to live by the spirit of Christmas, meaning generosity and kindness, every day of the year, not just on December 25.

Tennyson, grieving the sudden death of his closest friend, decides that the pain of losing someone is better than never having loved them. It was written about friendship and death, not a breakup.

If you spend even a little less than you earn, you are fine. If you spend even a little more, you are in trouble. The size of the gap matters less than which side of the line you are on.

The poet lists the ways she loves her husband: as deeply as her soul can reach, in everyday needs, freely, purely, with all her life, and, if God allows, even more after death.

The poet asks the New Year's bells to ring away the old year's grief, quarrels and injustice and to ring in kindness, truth and peace.

Truth did give a famous speech for women's rights in 1851, but the refrain “Ain't I a woman?” appears only in a version published twelve years later by another activist.

Thoreau explains why he moved to Walden Pond: to strip life down to its essentials and find out what it really has to teach, so that he would not reach death and discover he had not lived.

Thoreau argues that most people work themselves to exhaustion for things they don't need, and hide their despair behind ordinary routines. Walden is his experiment in living otherwise.

Douglass's argument that freedom is never handed over by those in power. It has to be demanded, and the demand will be uncomfortable.

Lincoln's warning that the United States could not stay half slave and half free forever. He borrowed the image from the Gospels, where Jesus uses it to answer critics.

Dickens describes the years before the French Revolution as a time of extremes, then adds the sting: it was much like his own day, when people also insisted everything was either the best or the worst.

Dickinson pictures hope as a small bird that lives in the soul, sings without stopping through every storm, and never asks for anything in return.

The last words of the Gettysburg Address, spoken at a cemetery for Union soldiers. Lincoln turned a funeral into a promise that the war was being fought to keep democracy itself alive.

Everyone makes good resolutions on January 1 and breaks them within days. Twain teases his readers that they will soon be “paving hell” with their good intentions, as they do every year.

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln asked Americans to give thanks for good harvests and for the country's blessings, and to pray for widows, orphans and the healing of the nation.

Old age is not a decline to dread but the goal that youth was preparing for. Browning's speaker invites a listener to grow old with him because the later years complete the life.

Spencer's phrase for natural selection: organisms best suited to their environment survive and reproduce. “Fittest” means best adapted, not strongest.

Mothers shape the next generation, so their influence on the world is greater than any king's or general's. The poem praises motherhood as the strongest force for good.

Spoken weeks before the Civil War ended and six weeks before Lincoln was killed. He asked the winning side to heal the nation without revenge.

Jo March grumbles that Christmas is ruined because the family is too poor for gifts. The rest of the chapter shows the sisters discovering that giving to others makes the day.

Talking with her mother after Beth's death, Jo says no one loves you like a mother, while admitting she is starting to long for other kinds of love too.

Howe called on mothers everywhere to unite and refuse to let their sons be sent to kill other mothers' sons. Her Mother's Day was a day of protest for peace.

Emerson means we become strong by harnessing forces greater than ourselves, like wind, water and great ideas, and letting them carry our work. Aim your effort in the direction those higher powers already move.

The present day is never ordinary. Emerson warns against the illusion that the important moment is always somewhere else, and says today is the critical, decisive day.

Being too nosy can get you into trouble. It is usually said as a light warning to someone asking too many questions.

Whether something is beautiful depends on the person looking at it. There is no single standard everyone shares.

Latin for “love of fate.” Nietzsche used it for the attitude of wanting your life exactly as it is, hard parts included, instead of merely putting up with it.

Acton's argument that historians should not excuse popes and kings because of their office. He wrote “tends to” corrupt, a qualification usually dropped.

Art is not meant to teach, preach or serve a practical purpose. Its value is that it is beautiful and gives pleasure, the way a flower does.

Lord Darlington, a society man in love, says that everyone is flawed, but some people still look up toward something higher. His friends tease him for being romantic.

The catchphrase of Sherlock Holmes, which he never says in the original stories. Holmes does say “Elementary” and “my dear Watson,” but never together.

Twain's joke when a newspaper wrongly reported he was dying. His real words were drier: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Replying to an eight-year-old who asked if Santa was real, Church argued that love, generosity and wonder are real even though no one can see them, and that Santa Claus is real in the same way.