The quote database

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me.

Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object.

The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated--being suddenly removed from them--they seemed as dead to me.

A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.

From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business.

The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations.

It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round--and what is it all for?

Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.

Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like.

Competence to age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had.

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will

To teach, to rule, to make, to decorate, to distribute,—these are not sex-functions: they are race-functions.

Little by little, very slowly, and with most unjust and cruel opposition, at cost of all life holds most dear, it is being gradually established by many martyrdoms that human work is woman’s as well as man’s.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best.

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.

As the racial distinction of humanity lies in its social relation, so we find the distinctive gains and losses of humanity to lie also in its social relation. We are more affected by our relation to each other than by our physical environment.

What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.

To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to organize it is another step.

The inevitable trend of human life is toward higher civilization.

That any living woman should prefer it to home and husband, to love and motherhood, throws a fierce light on what women must have suffered for lack of freedom before.

The basic condition of human life is union; the organic social relation, the interchange of functional service, wherein the individual is most advantaged, not by his own exertions for his own goods, but by the exchange of his exertions with the exertions of others for goods produced by them together.