Thomas Wentworth Higginson Quotes
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In our methodical American life, we still recognize some magic in summer. Most persons at least resign themselves to being decently happy in June. They accept June. They compliment its weather. They complain of the earlier months as cold, and so spend them in the city; and they complain of the later months as hot, and so refrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly a necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June, and cast the rest away.
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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.
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What instruction the baby brings to the mother!
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Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.
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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.
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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.
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That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.
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Noble discontent is the path to heaven.
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Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.
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The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.
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What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?
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After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.
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Fields are won by those who believe in the winning.
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To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.