19th Century Quotes

“The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go together.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

“But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Rome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair."
"Why should you, with so much energy and talent?"
"That's just why, because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a common-place dauber, so I don't intend to try anymore.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.

I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Trenton got up and made for the bathroom. On the way he paused to put a record on the gramophone. He loved music first thing in the morning and his good friend Fred Astaire was a particular favourite. As he stepped into the bath, he began to sing along. ‘Da da da da da da…I’m putting’ on my top hat, tying up my white tie, brushing’ off my tails.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“[N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Writing history is slippery, there is little Truth with an upper case T, but a lot of lower-case “truths” that are filtered through the perceptions of others.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“Wallace would not have been as successful as he was without Ali’s support.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“So he was queer, E.M. Forster. It wasn't his middle name (that would be 'Morgan'), but it was his orientation, his romping pleasure, his half-secret, his romantic passion. In the long-suppressed novel Maurice the title character blurts out his truth, 'I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.' It must have felt that way when Forster came of sexual age in the last years of the 19th century: seriously risky and dangerously blurt-able. The public cry had caught Wilde, exposed and arrested him, broken him in prison. He was one face of anxiety to Forster; his mother was another. As long as she lived (and they lived together until she died, when he was 66), he couldn't let her know.”
― Michael Levenson

“In international commerce, India is an ancient country-(19th October, 1899)”
― Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

“By the nineteenth century, society had given up burning witches. Yet the sexual exploitation of children continued. In late-nineteenth-century Britain, for example, men who raped young girls were excused because they did it to cure venereal disease. There was a widely held belief that children would take "poisons" out of the body. In fact, leprosy, venereal disease, depression, and impotence were part of a wide range of maladies believed cured by having sex with the young. An English medical text of the time reads, "Breaking a maiden's seal is one of the best antidotes for one's ills. Cudgeling her unceasingly, until she swoons away, is a mighty remedy for man's depression. It cures all impotence.”
― Patrick J. Carnes, Sexual Anorexia: Overcoming Sexual Self-Hatred

“There are no longer any real passions in the nineteenth century: that's why one is so bored in France. People commit acts of the greatest cruelty, but without any feeling of cruelty.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Dervishes died as the bullets smacked into them, but the rest never even thought of pausing. In a society where bravery and reputation counted for much more than mere wealth, the warrior creed drove them forward. Ancient blades flashed in the sunlight and swung again, now covered in fresh blood. In short order the ground was littered with torn and mangled Egyptian corpses and the battle was over.”
― Nigel Seed, No Road to Khartoum

“Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.”
― Lester B. Pearson

“The people of the 19th century were so much more progressive then the people of the 21st century.”
― Isaiah Senones

“You know sir. When we get home nobody is going to believe this. How the hell could anybody be that brave? It makes no sense.”
“You’re right, but we’ll know. Everybody who has stood and watched a Dervish charge is never going to forget it.”
― Nigel Seed, No Road to Khartoum

“Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays on Manners, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Nature, Friendship

“Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.”
― Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film

“Well, speaking of supper, let's get it underway," she proposed. "Is there any meat in the house?"

"There's plenty of chickens in the chicken house out back," Sam responded. "I'll get Aaron to help me, and we'll kill a couple of roosters."

"Oh, my!" exclaimed Margaret. "Well, that will be fresh chicken, for sure!”
― Sarah Brazytis, The House on Harmony Street

“He was thoughtful and grave----but the order he gave, were enough to bewilder a crew.”
― Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

“Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter's life.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I am a remarkable woman, always was, although none of you seemed to notice”
― May Morris

“Your grandfather must have been a wonderful man," Arabella said in an awed voice, looking about her at the beautiful house, well-proportioned barn, and the variety of shade and fruit trees so carefully and tastefully planted.

"My family," John added wisely, "says I'm very like him.”
― Sarah Brazytis, The Letter

“Se tutti combattessero soltanto in base alle loro convinzioni, la guerra non esisterebbe”
― Lev Tolstoj, Guerra e pace

“Μου αρέσει η Ιταλία; Ιδού το ερώτημα. Είχα πάντα την αίσθηση ότι ήταν τρομερή χώρα. Η απερίγραπτη ομορφιά της συνοδεύεται με τις πιο ζοφερές σκέψεις. Όπου και να πας θα βρείς ίχνη από αίμα και δάκρυα. Για να είμαι ειλικρινής, αυτό ισχύει παντού στον κόσμο, εδώ όμως είναι πολύ πιο εμφανές απ ότι στις άλλες χώρες. Καθώς περνούσαν οι αιώνες, έρχονταν κι έφευγαν πόλεμοι και τυραννίες, τρομερές θεομηνίες, αμέτρητα βάσανα στα παλάτια και στα καλύβια. Διακρίνεις κάτι το ανήλεο στον γαλανό ουρανό που θεώρησε απαθής όλα αυτά. Σε ότι αφορά τον κόσμο, μπορείτε να διακρίνετε αιώνες οδύνης ζωγραφισμένους επάνω σε αυτά τα πρόσωπα και να τους ακούσετε στη φωνή των ανθρώπων. Ναι, ναι, μου αρέσει η Ιταλία. Αλλά με την ευγενέστερη σημασία της λέξης.”
― George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea

“Та изм’кна из торба си –
страх ме е да кажем.
Нек ви кажам! – Тја изм’кна
крвава кошуља, моми,
синовна кошуља!
Бе исшарена кошуља
од грло до поли,
бе исшарена кошуља
сос крвави капки!
Капки крвави, о моми,
г’сти, та големи,
срце ми од них застина,
очи, уста – неми!
Тешка ти година, бабо,
немаш вече сина!”
― Рајко Жинзифов, Крвава кошула

“...while the troubles sweeping Europe and southern Britain comprised liberal and radical elements protesting against powerful elites to secure better rights, in Badenoch it was the opposite - a subtle exercise of power by a small but influential outsider elite seeking to sweep aside the long-established rights of the lower orders, whose mere presence disrupted their leisure pursuits. There was, of course, a measure of protest, but the scattered and impoverished nature of local communities rendered them powerless. Land-owners knew well enough which side their bread was buttered on - a trend that became increasingly evident over the next two decades.”
― David Taylor, 'The People Are Not There': The Transformation of Badenoch 1800 - 1863

“— Я думаю, что когда родятся дети, которых не хотят, их надо сразу же убивать, прежде чем в них войдет душа, а не давать им расти и ходить.

Сью не ответила, раздумывая, как обращаться с этим чересчур мудрым ребенком.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Of course I never mention it to them any more, - I am too wise, - but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition

“In all the years I’ve been working at the Bureau, no one ever broke my nose until tonight, you Guinea bastard,” Roper said.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: Leave Murder to the Professionals