The more one knows of our life the more one must denounce it, lest it be suspected that one has a personal motive in defending it.... When other women speak of us you must assume an attitude of scorn, not only to protect yourself from suspicion, but that you may also feel it for yourself and have no temptation to return. When you think of us do not remember any small kindness that we may have shown you or that we show to one another. Remember only the things that have shocked you and outraged your traditions and your sense of decency. Remember your sufferings at the hands of beasts who are miscalled men. If you keep these things in view you will never again fall into temptation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and t...alked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of ... />profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a "life-work" of teaching, of social work--we know that we would lay it down with ...hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with... anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Causists have tried to twist "doing good" into another form of "doing evil," and have said "you get pleasure yourself by giving th...is pleasure to another: so it is merely a refined kind of selfishness, as your own pleasure is a motive for what you do." I say, "it is not selfishness, that my own pleasure should be a motive so long as it is not the motive that would outweigh the other, if the two came into collision." The "selfish man" is he who would do the thing, even if it harmed others, so long as it gave him pleasure: the "unselfish man" is he who would still do the thing, even if it gave him no pleasure, so long as it pleased others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »