Rebecca Harding Davis Quotes

#1. Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#2. We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#3. Men and women thought and did noble and mean things that would have been impossible to them before or after. A man cannot drink old Bourbon long and remain in his normal condition. We did not drink Bourbon, but blood.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#4. I suppose that the party or sect which is to do any work in the world must breathe its own peculiar atmosphere, speak its own little patois, and see but one side of the question on which it fights.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#5. Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#6. The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#7. One sees that dead, vacant look steal over the rarest, finest of women's faces ... in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces ...

Rebecca Harding Davis

#8. Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#9. The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#10. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#11. While the light burning within may have been divine, the outer case of the lamp was assuredly cheap enough.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#12. You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#13. Reform is born of need, not pity.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#14. It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#15. Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#16. It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#17. America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#18. We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#19. These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#20. North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#21. But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#22. I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#23. It was part of your religion to hate the British.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#24. Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#25. You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#26. Nowhere in this country, from sea to sea, does nature comfort us with such assurance of plenty, such rich and tranquil beauty as in those unsung, unpainted hills of Pennsylvania.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#27. No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#28. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#29. Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#30. It is a mistake to talk of the twilight of age, or the blurred sight of old people. The long day grows clearer at its close, and the petty fogs of prejudice which rose between us and our fellows in youth melt away as the sun goes down. At last we see God's creatures as they are.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#31. TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#32. The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#33. But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#34. For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#35. Well, what was it to be a thief? He met the question at last, face to face, wiping the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead. God made this money - the fresh air, too - for his children's use. He never made the difference between poor and rich.

Rebecca Harding Davis