Top 28 Thomas Wentworth Higginson Quotes
#1. Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#2. Many persons sigh for death when it seems far off, but the inclination vanishes when the boat upsets, or the locomotive runs off the track, or the measles set it.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#5. Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#7. All ... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#8. Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#9. An easy thing, O Power Divine, To thank thee for these gifts of Thine, For summer's sunshine, winter's snow, For hearts that kindle thoughts that glow ...
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#10. In ancient Boeotia brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in token, that they would never again be needed.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#11. If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#12. The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#14. How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,
a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#15. In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud a heroic deed.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#16. The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#17. It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#19. Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and novel-reading, and crochet-needle, and the occasional manufacture of sponge cake.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#20. The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me, and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#22. What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#25. Only yonder magnificent pine-tree ... holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year's ebb.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#27. Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
