Thus the reader who hath most truly considered and digested the sentiments which he reads must be a man of the best taste and must... find most pleasure in the perusal of authors worth the reading. It is but to preserve candor enough to keep up an impartial attention and, instead of being actuated by a false shame of ignorance, to know when properly to confess myself a learner, and I have it in my power (as far as my capacity will reach) to command any knowledge that is extant in the whole universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When as the rye reach to the chin, And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,... Strawberries swimming in the cream, And school-boys playing in the stream;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people and... start them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You glorify the women who made their way to the front to reach you in your misery, and nurse you back to life. You called us angel...s. Who opened the way for women to go and make it possible?... For every woman's hand that ever cooled your fevered brows, staunched your bleeding wounds, gave food to your famished bodies, or water to your parching lips, and called back life to your perishing bodies, you should bless God for Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances D. Gage and their followers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us--that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt t...hemselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions--they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer ... writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next,... and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not bedding, but a "relationship," is what women seek. And in this difference it is impossible to fail to acknowledge a distinct s...uperiority of the feminine sensibility, however cantish this may sound. Whereas men are overwhelmed by the strong pulsations of the body, women remain free to bestow a wider meaning to the corporeal elements of the erotic. The erotic does not end in spastic contractions and reflex discharges; it transcends them, to reach into the ethereal realms of memory and feeling, like a note that reverberates long after the string has pulsated. Woman may resort to her body in ways congruous with her aims and in a fashion is apt to be ranked as "manipulative." But only when she is long remembered and continually desired, as if by a cyclically renewed, ever kindled thirst; only when her image fills to capacity the consciousness of the man she has chosen, and stretches temporally beyond the meager boundaries of physiologic immediacy; only then does she claim to have won. When her immanent presence projects across time and space to leave a profound impress on another being: then she has "scored."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »