John Greenleaf Whittier
» Action » “Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.”
» Age and Aging » “O Time and change! — with hair as gray as was my sire’s that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!”
» Beauty » “Beauty seen is never lost, God’s colors all are fast.”
» Bereavement » “They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead, that all of thee we loved and cherished has with thy summer roses perished; and left, as its young beauty fled, an ashen memory in its stead.”
» Burial » “The dreariest spot in all the land to Death they set apart; with scanty grace from Nature’s hand, and none from that of Art.”
» Cities and City Life » “Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.”
» Drugs » “Of all that Orient lands can vaunt, of marvels with our own competing, the strangest is the Haschish plant, and what will follow on its eating.”
» Faith » “When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead.”
» Farming and Farmers » “Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.”
» Heroes and Heroism » “One brave deed makes no hero.”
» Libraries » “Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.”
» Media » “On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll; on plastic clay and leather scroll, man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed, and lo! the Press was found at last!”
» Men » “How dwarfed against his manliness she sees the poor pretension, the wants, the aims, the follies, born of fashion and convention!”
» Nostalgia » “Oh, for boyhood’s painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor’s rules, knowledge never learned of schools.”
» Peace » “Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew.”
» Regret » “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ”It might have been!””
» Resolution » “Clothe with life the weak intent, let me be the thing I meant.”
