1870s

An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.

The Descent of Man · 1871

★ 8.5

Victor Hugo

1878

★ 8.4

Go West, young man.

Horace Greeley

1870

★ 8.3

Essay · Political literature

America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.

Walt Whitman

Democratic Vistas · 1871

★ 7.6

Life, what is it but a dream?

Through the Looking-Glass · 1871

★ 7.1

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Molly Bawn · 1878

★ 7.0

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

1874

★ 7.0

Political literature · Philosophical literature

The State is not "abolished", it withers away.

Friedrich Engels

Anti-Duhring · 1878

★ 7.0

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Charles Dudley Warner

1870

★ 6.9

Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.

Benjamin Disraeli

1877

★ 6.9

Autobiography and memoir · Travel writing

We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world....and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend.

1879

★ 6.9

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once, be dried up.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov · 1879

★ 6.4

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea.

The Descent of Man · 1871

★ 6.3

Essay · Philosophical literature

John Stuart Mill

The Utility of Religion · 1873

★ 6.2

What people say behind your back is your standing in the community in which you live.

Edgar W. Howe

1877

★ 6.0

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina · 1877

★ 5.6

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov · 1879

★ 5.6

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged... On account of race, color, or previous condition or servitude.

1870

★ 5.5

Novel · Children's literature · Adventure novel

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · 1876

★ 5.5

Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our to-day.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human · 1878

★ 5.5

When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.

On the Origin of Species · 1879

★ 5.5

If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

Through the Looking-Glass · 1871

★ 5.5

And though hard be the task, "Keep a stiff upper lip."

Phoebe Cary

1870

★ 5.4

Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.

Arthur Rimbaud

The Drunken Boat · 1871

★ 5.4

Novel · Children's literature

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings."

Through the Looking-Glass · 1871

★ 5.4

It is the glory of each generation to make its own precedents.

Belva Lockwood

1877

★ 5.4

An honest God is the noblest work of man.

Robert G. Ingersoll

1874

★ 5.3

It is my land, my home, my father's land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.

Geronimo

1877

★ 5.3

Personal journal

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Thomas Hardy

1871

★ 5.2

Letter

Taste is the feminine of genius.

Edward FitzGerald

1877

★ 5.2

When the white men came we gave them lands, and did not wish to hurt them. But the white man drove us back and took our lands. Then the Great Father made us many promises, but they are not kept. He promised to give us large presents, and when they came to us they were small; they seemed to be lost on the way.

Red Cloud

1870

★ 5.2

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

John Morley

1872

★ 5.2

Through his passion nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Venus in Furs · 1870

★ 5.1

But, as the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off a given time by the brain and purpose of man.

William E. Gladstone

Kin Beyond Sea · 1878

★ 5.0

Now every tradition grows continually more venerable, the farther off lies its origin, the more this is lost sight of; the veneration paid it accumulates from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human · 1878

★ 4.6

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

T.H. Huxley

1877

★ 4.5

Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn't sense enough to know whom to despise.

Thomas Hardy

A Pair of Blue Eyes · 1872

★ 4.4

If you tie up a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth, and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented, nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They can not tell me.

Chief Joseph

1879

★ 4.4

Novel · Children's literature · Adventure novel

In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · 1876

★ 4.0

The eternal error men make in imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina · 1877

★ 4.0

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina · 1877

★ 4.0

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human · 1878

★ 4.0

It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.

Walt Whitman

Democratic Vistas · 1871

★ 3.9

Essay · Political literature

Always vote.

Walt Whitman

Democratic Vistas · 1871

★ 3.9

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts-not to hurt others.

Middlemarch · 1872

★ 3.9

We boil at different degrees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Eloquence · 1870

★ 3.8

The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the Universe, proceeded.

The Descent of Man · 1871

★ 3.8

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

The Descent of Man · 1871

★ 3.8

Novel · Children's literature

Through the Looking-Glass · 1871

★ 3.8

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

Middlemarch · 1872

★ 3.8

Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor.

Middlemarch · 1872

★ 3.8

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Middlemarch · 1872

★ 3.8

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Daniel Deronda · 1876

★ 3.8

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Daniel Deronda · 1876

★ 3.8

Prose is for ideas, Verse is for visions.

Henrik Ibsen

1871

★ 3.7

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

1872

★ 3.7

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men.

Susan B. Anthony

1872

★ 3.7

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens, but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people-women as well as men.

Susan B. Anthony

1873

★ 3.7

I believe that our Great Maker is preparing the world, in His own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and navies will be no longer required.

Ulysses S. Grant

Second Inaugural Address of Ulysses S. Grant · 1873

★ 3.7

For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

1874

★ 3.7

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

T.H. Huxley

1876

★ 3.7

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee · 1877

★ 3.7

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1878

★ 3.7

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

But the wheel what squeaks the loudest Is the one what gets the grease.

1879

★ 3.7

Josh Billings

1870

★ 3.6

I have bathed in the Poem of the Sea, steeped in Stars, and milky, devouring the green azures.

Arthur Rimbaud

1871

★ 3.6

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1873

★ 3.6

Wine may well be considered the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.

Louis Pasteur

1873

★ 3.6

You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him.

John Morley

1874

★ 3.6

Autobiography and memoir

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.

Julia Margaret Cameron

1874

★ 3.6

It is hard for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Thomas Hardy

Far From the Madding Crowd · 1874

★ 3.6

Marriage is like life in this-that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

1876

★ 3.6

Play

Henrik Ibsen

Pillars of Society · 1877

★ 3.6

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

1877

★ 3.6

I am tired of fighting... I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.

Chief Joseph

1877

★ 3.6

The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one.

F.W. Bourdillon

1878

★ 3.6

Personal journal

It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.

Francis Kilvert

1871

★ 3.5

Paper · Travel writing

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

1872

★ 3.5