Francis Parkman > Quotes

“Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.”
― Francis Parkman

“He professed himself a Catholic, but his Catholicity sat lightly on him;”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“until”
― Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: sketches of prairie and Rocky-Mountain life

“Membertou first was catechised, confessed his sins, and renounced the Devil, whom we are told he had faithfully served during a hundred and ten years.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Whatever may have been the feelings of Washington, he has left no record of them. His immense fortitude was doomed to severer trials in the future; yet perhaps this miserable morning was the darkest of his life. He was deeply moved by sights of suffering; and all around him were wounded men borne along in torture, and weary men staggering under the living load. His pride was humbled, and his young ambition seemed blasted in the bud. It was the fourth of July. He could not foresee that he was to make that day forever glorious to a new-born nation hailing him as its father.”
― Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe

“The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly campfires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed content; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly campfires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Had they put forth to maintain themselves at Port Royal the energy and resource which they exerted to escape from it, they might have laid the cornerstone of a solid colony.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Soft-hearted philanthropists,’ thought I”
― Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail

“Duval's body, swinging from a gibbet, gave wholesome warning to those he had seduced; and his head was displayed on a pike, from the highest roof of the buildings, food for birds and a lesson to sedition.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Yet”
― Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail

“At the end of the eighteenth century, the three Orders of Saint Francis numbered a hundred and fifteen thousand friars and twenty-eight thousand nuns. Four popes, forty-five cardinals, and forty-six canonized martyrs were enrolled on their record, besides about two thousand more who had shed their blood for the faith. Their missions embraced nearly all the known world; and, in 1621, there were in Spanish America alone five hundred Franciscan convents.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly campfires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keepe good companie.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Her manifold ills were summed up in the King. Since the Valois, she had had no monarch so worthless. He did not want understanding, still less the graces of person. In his youth the people called him the “Well-beloved”; but by the middle of the century they so detested him that he dared not pass through Paris, lest the mob should execrate him. He had not the vigor of the true tyrant; but his languor, his hatred of all effort, his profound selfishness, his listless disregard of public duty, and his effeminate libertinism, mixed with superstitious devotion, made him no less a national curse.”
― Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe

“I chose the worst of the three, and for the greater part of that day I lay on the buffalo-robes, fairly revelling in the creations of that resplendent genius which has achieved no more signal triumph than that of half-beguiling us to forget the pitiful and unmanly character of its possessor.”
― Francis Parkman, The Orgeon Trail

“The scheme of English colonization made no account of the Indian tribes. In the scheme of French colonization they were all in all.”
― Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

“Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.

Francis Parkman”
― Francis Parkman