top of page
"And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes."
Standard
Customized
More

"My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana, in my eighth year... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher... but that was all."
Author Name
Personal Development

"We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The Babies we were are buried, and their shadows are plodding on."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?"
Author Name
Personal Development

"Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Luis is right there. I point to the corner of the yard, where my little brother is the centre of attention doing imitations of barnyard animals. I have yet to inform him that talent isn't as much of a chick magnet when you get into junior high."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Children played at those stories, they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Hat's the worst of growing up, and I'm beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don't seem half so wonderful to you when you get them."
Author Name
Personal Development
More

"Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are."
Travel

"At last I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the predestinated purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain.I believe that this wise and blessed frame of mind would have continued with me, had it not been for the unsolicited and uncharitable remarks obtruded upon me by my professional friends who visited the rooms. But thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous."
Life

"Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness."
Ethics

"The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed."
Philosophy

"Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds."
Life

"The most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril."
Character

"Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?"
Habit

"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness."
Wisdom

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."
Life

"Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise."
Life
bottom of page