1890

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 5.4

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar... Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set in their lands. They sent 10,000 horsemen to battle. Where are the warriors to-day? Who slew them? Where are our lands ? Who owns them ? What white man can say I ever stole his lands or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever when a captive insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and gone unfed ? Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children ? What law have I broken ? Is it wrong for me to love my own ? Is it wicked in me because my skin is red ; because I am a Sioux ; because I was born where my fathers lived ; because I would die for my people and my country ?

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 5.3

Sitting Bull

1890

★ 5.3

How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof!...In such places standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make—leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents, or piled stone—we all dwell in a house of one room—the world with the firmament for its roof—and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.

1890

★ 5.2

Some people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far more ready to point out wherein they consist, than others are. They are the wits, the poets, the inventors, the scientific men, the practical geniuses.

It is cocaine...a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 5.2

Novel · Magazine · Detective fiction

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Sign of Four · 1890

★ 4.5

Genius lasts longer than Beauty.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.9

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.9

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.9

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.8

There is always something ridiculous about the passions of people whom one has ceased to love.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.8

Those who are faithful know only the pleasures of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.8

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name we gave to our mistakes.

Four things greater than all things are,— Women and Horses and Power and War.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.8

Poem

Rudyard Kipling

1890

★ 3.7

Habit is... The enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

I am not arguing with you-I am telling you.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 3.7

James McNeill Whistler

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies · 1890

★ 3.6

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.

1890

★ 3.6

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…It is nothing jointed; it flows. A "river" or a "stream" are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 3.6

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 3.6

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

1890

★ 3.5

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.

A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

1890

★ 3.5

Speech

Crowfoot

1890

★ 3.5

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.2

Anybody can be good in the country.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.2

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.1

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.1

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 2.1

Beauty is a form of genius,—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell, we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.0

Realize your youth while you have it... Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.0

Genius... Means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 2.0

Magazine

Alfred Thayer Mahan

1890

★ 1.9

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

1890

★ 1.9

In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society... Now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life, — the right to be let alone; the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges; and the term "property" has grown to comprise every possession — intangible, as well as tangible.

The Principles of Psychology · 1890

★ 1.9

Legal writing

Louis Brandeis

The Right to Privacy · 1890

★ 1.9

Art should be independent of all claptrap-should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it.

James McNeill Whistler

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies · 1890

★ 1.8

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 1.3

The mind of the thoroughly well informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.