1883 · Skopia

Hiding in an apple barrel, a boy overhears the ship's cook planning mutiny. Stevenson invented the pirate everyone pictures: Long John Silver's parrot and missing leg, the treasure map marked with crosses.

★ 6.6

Philosophical literature

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!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 6.4

Philosophical literature

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 6.4

Philosophical literature

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 5.6

Philosophical literature

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra · 1883

★ 5.6

Speech · Political speech

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.

Frederick Douglass

1883

★ 5.5

Letter

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

Historical literature

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

Karl Marx

The German Ideology · 1883

★ 3.8

Speech · Political speech

Despite of it all, the Negro remains like iron or granite, cool, strong, imperturbable and cheerful.

Frederick Douglass

1883

★ 3.8

Personal journal

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

1883

★ 3.6

Poem

Oh! the old swimmin' hole! When I last saw the place, The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face.

James Whitcomb Riley

1883

★ 3.5

Poem

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Solitude · 1883

★ 2.9

Political literature · Economic literature

Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves.

Karl Marx

Grundrisse · 1883

★ 2.1

Novel

There was never a great man who had not a great mother.

Olive Schreiner

The Story of an African Farm · 1883

★ 2.0

Speech

Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old, and weary, and broken of heart, whose burdens be heavy upon them, and who would lie down and be at rest.

Mark Twain

1883

★ 1.9

Letter

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Vincent van Gogh

1883

★ 1.3

Novel

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

Emile Zola

The Ladies' Paradise · 1883

★ 1.2

Lecture

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 meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

1883

★ 1.0

Autobiography and memoir

A man who entertains in his mind any political doctrine, except as a means of improving the condition of his fellows, I regard as a political intriguer, a charlatan, and a conjuror.

Anthony Trollope

1883

★ 0.9

Lecture

The Forgotten Man... Delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school... But he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide. Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays-but his chief business in life is to pay... Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?

William Graham Sumner

1883

★ 0.9