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.

Autobiography and memoir · Travel writing

1884

★ 7.1

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

If I can stop one Heart from breaking I shall not live in vain If I can ease one Life the Aching Or cool one Pain Or help one fainting Robin Unto his Nest again I shall not live in Vain.

Emily Dickinson

1886

★ 5.2

The man of business…goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.

George Bernard Shaw

1889

★ 5.2

The truth is, that the law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

1880

★ 5.1

A purpose is the eternal condition of success. Nothing will take its place. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is a proverb... Education will not; the country is full of unsuccessful educated men... There is no road to success but through a clear, strong purpose.

Theodore T. Munger

On the Threshold · 1881

★ 5.1

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have no winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

William Ernest Henley

Invictus · 1888

★ 5.1

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 4.9

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 4.8

The broad effects which can obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but dos not make him "better."

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

Genealogy of Morals · 1887

★ 4.6

Play

Henrik Ibsen

An Enemy of the People · 1882

★ 4.5

Lecture

God made integers, all else is the work of man.

Leopold Kronecker

1886

★ 4.5

Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one, and war is a link in God's world order. In him, the noblest virtues of man, courage and renunciation, devotion to duty and willingness to sacrifice, unfold with the institution of life. Without the war, the world would become bogged down in materialism.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

1880

★ 4.3

Essay · Sociology

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

William Graham Sumner

Sociology · 1881

★ 4.3

Lecture

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again-these are the essential conditions for the making of a people.

Ernest Renan

1882

★ 4.3

We are the tools are vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

John Swinton

Chicago Labor Enquirer · 1888

★ 4.3

All kings is mostly rapscallions.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 4.0

It’s lovely to live on a raft.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 4.0

Poem · Philosophical literature

The Gay Science · 1882

★ 3.9

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 3.9

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 3.9

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 3.9

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.

Beyond Good and Evil · 1886

★ 3.9

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court · 1889

★ 3.9

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