Rebecca Harding Davis

“The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.”

“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.”

“It was part of your religion to hate the British.”

“But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.”

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

“Reform is born of need, not pity.”

“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.”

“Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”