Rebecca Harding Davis Quotes

The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

... while the light burning within may have been divine, the outer case of the lamp was assuredly cheap enough.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

Nowhere in this country, from sea to sea, does nature comfort us with such assurance of plenty, such rich and tranquil beauty as in those unsung, unpainted hills of Pennsylvania.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

It was part of your religion to hate the British.

North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

Reform is born of need not pity.

The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.