1897 · Skopia

Showing 50 works across all media from 1897

The Sleeping Gypsy

Genre painting · Primitivism

The Sleeping Gypsy

1897 · Private collection

A lion sniffs at a sleeper in the desert without waking her. Rousseau was a customs officer who never took a lesson.

★ 8.5

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus... Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Francis Pharcellus Church

1897

★ 8.3

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 7.7

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

1897

★ 7.3

Fiction · Epistolary novel

Dracula

1897 · 512 pages

An English solicitor rides into the Carpathians to close a property deal and finds his client is a corpse with plans for London. Every undead figure since works from Stoker's Count.

★ 7.0

The Boulevard Montmartre at Night

Cityscape · Impressionism

The Boulevard Montmartre at Night

Camille Pissarro

1897 · National Gallery, London

Pissarro painted these boulevards from a hotel window over and over, but only once after dark, the gaslight smeared across wet pavement.

★ 6.9

Nonfiction · Sociology

Suicide

A Study In Sociology

1897 · 405 pages

Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics, single people more often than married. Durkheim turned the most private act into a social fact, and every social science since counts the way he counted.

★ 6.8

Fiction · Science fiction

The War of the Worlds

1897 · 138 pages

Cylinders fall on Horsell Common outside Woking, and the Martians rise out of them with heat-rays and walking machines. Wells turned the British Empire's own conquests around and pointed them at Surrey.

★ 6.6

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

What Is Art? · 1897

★ 6.4

To recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

De Profundis · 1897

★ 6.1

One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.

1897

★ 5.5

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

De Profundis · 1897

★ 5.5

My task... To make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

1897

★ 5.4

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

1897

★ 5.3

It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

1897

★ 4.3

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

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