Bayard Taylor Quotes

"The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring."

"The view of the Rocky Mountains from the Divide near Kiowa Creek is considered one of the finest in Colorado."

"London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world."

"In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites."

"Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin to live."

"An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered."

"Could one live on the sense of beauty alone, exempt from the necessity of 'creature comforts,' a sea-voyage would be delightful."

"'Really,' thought I, 'we call Baltimore the 'Monumental City' for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!'"

"It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own."

"Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force."

"As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me."

"Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it."

"The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo."

"So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici."

"I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters... but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man - Alexander von Humboldt."

"The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian."

"Verily there is nothing in all Europe so beautiful as Valldemosa."

"I know of nothing more moving, indeed semi-tragic, than the yearning helplessness in the face of a dog, who understands what is said to him, and can not answer!"

"Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation."

"I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it."

"People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler."

"I study hard at Russian, which is a tough but most attractive language."

"The history of Germany is not the history of a nation, but of a race. It has little unity, therefore; it is complicated, broken, and attached on all sides to the histories of other countries."

"There is a degree of confidence exhibited towards strangers in Sweden, especially in hotels, at post-stations, and on board the inland steamers, which tells well for the general honesty of the people."

"The more I see of the Swedes, the more I am convinced that there is no kinder, simpler, and honester people in the world."

"So far as regards their moral character, the Finns have as little cause for reproach as any other people."

"My duty is that of a chronicler; and if I perform that conscientiously, the lessons which my observations suggest will need no pointing out."

"The Germans form one of the most important branches of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan race - a division of the human family which also includes the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and the Slavonic tribes."

"The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word 'Arya,' meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history."