Thomas Wentworth Higginson Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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
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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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That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.
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The Englishman's strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American's disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall.
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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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Noble discontent is the path to heaven.
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Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.
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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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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.