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Classic Quotes by Sarah Orne Jewett

1849-1909

US writer

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future.
Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

Yes’m, old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.
 

Classic Quotes by Henry George

1839-1897

US economist

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.

That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.

Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it

Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her.
This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.

Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing
influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.
 

Classic Quotes by Lady Marguerite Blessington

1789-1849

Irish writer

Prejudices are the chains forged by ignorance to keep men apart.

Love-matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.

A woman’s head is always influenced by heart; but a man’s heart by his head.

Talent, like beauty, to be pardoned, must be obscure and unostentatious.
 

Classic Quotes by Dr. Maria Montessori

1870-1952

Italian educator

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the
bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

The greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.
 

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
- Voltaire

“Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.”
- Blaise Pascal

“Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.”
- Jules Renard

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
- Voltaire

“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved
than it will be.”
- Marcel Pagnol

“Prejudices are what fools use for reason.”
- Voltaire

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”
- George Sand

Classic Quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832

German philosopher

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

A person hears only what they understand.

A person places themselves on a level with the ones they praise. ————————

A purpose you impart is no longer your own.

A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.

A useless life is an early death.

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Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.

Classic Quotes by Lyndon Baines Johnson

1908-1973

US President (36), Vice President (37)

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he’s going to get sick on it.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman… They are both… lawbreakers, destroyers of
constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

All that Hubert needs over there is a gal to answer the phone and a pencil with an eraser on it.

Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

Curtis Le May wants to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. You know how he likes to go around bombing.

Did you ever think that making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.
 

Classic Quotes by Guillaume Apollinaire

1880-1918

French writer

A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

“Come to the edge,” He said. They said, “We are afraid.” “Come to the edge,” He said. They came. He pushed them… and they flew.

I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.

Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.

To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.
 

Classic Quotes by Jean Rhys

1894-1979

Welsh-Dominican writer

I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men – at least they can cry.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall
be, world without end.”

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing
the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

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We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky – and it would be so much less fun if we were … Some must cry so that others may be
able to laugh the more heartily.

I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and one that is broken, sad as a woman who is growing
old.

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often a succession of jerks.