1880s

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov · 1880

★ 7.8

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

Twilight of the Idols · 1889

★ 7.7

"Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers!"

The Gay Science · 1882

★ 7.6

East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.

Rudyard Kipling

The Ballad of East and West · 1889

★ 7.5

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 7.5

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…it is the opium of the people.

Karl Marx

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right · 1883

★ 7.3

This is hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 7.3

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face.

The Gay Science · 1882

★ 7.3

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Vincent van Gogh

1881

★ 7.3

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus

The New Colossus · 1883

★ 7.2

Speech

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Mark Twain

1884

★ 7.1

Autobiography and memoir · Travel writing

There are no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.

Robert Louis Stevenson

1883

★ 7.0

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Lord Acton

1887

★ 6.9

Speech

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

William E. Gladstone

1886

★ 6.9

In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 6.5

If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 6.4

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 6.4

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 6.4

A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

Lew Wallace

Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ · 1880

★ 6.1

In the true marriage relation, the independence of the husband and wife is equal, the dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal.

Lucretia Mott

1880

★ 6.1

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov · 1880

★ 5.6

But what will become of men then? I asked him, without God and immortal life?

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov · 1880

★ 5.6

One must have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 5.6

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 5.6

It is not the strength but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 5.5

The masters have been done away with; the morality of the common man has triumphed.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man, without at last finding the other end of it fastened about his own neck.

Genealogy of Morals · 1887

★ 5.5

Speech · Political speech

Frederick Douglass

1883

★ 5.5

Play · Tragic play

One can live for years sometimes, without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into a single hour.

Oscar Wilde

1880

★ 5.4

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Gabriel Manigault

1884

★ 5.3

Much Madness is divinest Sense — To a discerning Eye — Much Sense—the starkest Madness — 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail — Assent—and you are sane — Demur—you're straightway dangerous — And handled with a Chain —

Emily Dickinson

1886

★ 5.2

Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.

Henry James

1883

★ 5.2

Lecture

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Electrical Units of Measurement · 1883

★ 5.2

Essay · Magazine

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James

1884

★ 5.2