C. L. R. James Quotes

Be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts, in all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.

Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?

Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.

The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.

If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, - and that is a book honestly come by.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

Earth's biggest country 's gut her soul, An' risen up earth's greatest nation.

Heaven is neither here nor there to me. Everywhere and nowhere. Just not in between, But I believe in Heaven.

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.

Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?

The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.

Hush! Still as death, The tempest holds his breath As from a sudden will; The rain stops short, but from the eaves You see it drop, and hear it from the leaves, All is so bodingly still.

Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as his sweetheart, yet it would not be wise to hold everyone an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.

The one thing finished in this hasty world.

Like streams that keep a summer mind Snow-hid in Jenooary.

To genius life never grows commonplace.

Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame; Ev'y thin' thet' s done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same.

Did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive?

A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.

You've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.

He's true to God who's true to man.

A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.

Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it.

A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.

Wut 's words to them whose faith an' truth On war's red techstone rang true metal; Who ventered life an' love an' youth For the gret prize o' death in battle?

An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.

It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.

His heart kep' goin' pity-pat, But hern went pity-Zekle.

Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.

To win the secret of a weed's plain heart.

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous.

I don't believe in princerple, But oh I du in interest.

To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.

A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.

That pernicious sentiment, "Our country, right or wrong."

Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like A star new-born that drops into its place And which, once circling in its placid round, Not all the tumult of the earth can shake.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

The material of thought re-acts upon the thought itself.

Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.

God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.

Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.