I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.
Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of truth and love and goodness.
How easy it is to fly on paper wings!
In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends.
Security is a myth. Mankind as a whole does not experience it, nor does it exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
God is love, God is our Father, and we are His children; therefore the darkest clouds will break, and though right be worsted, wrong shall not triumph.
Each individual has a subconscious memory of the green earth and murmuring waters, and blindness and deafness cannot rob him of this gift from past generations. This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense- a soul sense which sees, hears, and feels, all in one.
Once, while we were out on the water, the sun went down over the rim of the earth, and threw a soft, rosy light over the White City.
One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think.
Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.
But in this respect I do not think I am much worse off than the girls who take notes. If the mind is occupied with the mechanical process of hearing and putting words on paper at pell-mell speed, I should not think one could pay much attention to the subject under consideration or the manner in which it is presented.
Even notoriety may be turned to beneficent uses, and I rejoice if the disposition of the newspapers to record my activities results in bringing more often into their columns the word Socialism.
First – How did I become a Socialist? By reading.
Any teacher can take a child to the classroom, but not every teacher can make him learn.
Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, And in a little time we shall return again Into the vast, unanswering dark.
One brief spring, musical with the song of robin and mocking-bird, one summer rich in fruit and roses, one autumn of gold and crimson sped by and left their gifts at the feet of an eager, delighted child.
It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing. They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren stare.
Let the most romantic of us that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, re-combine it in the morning and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so coherent, when it came under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded, and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god.
We have seen that the world’s philosophers – the Sayers of the Word – were optimists; so also are the men of action and achievement – the Doers of the Word.
Optimism is the harmony between man’s spirit and the spirit of God pronouncing His works good.
I am content that others should be wiser than I.