💬 Quotes

"The thing that really saves you is that on the whole human beings are selfish and ignoble, and that they don't feel any great impulse to perform starry-eyed heroic actions for long periods."

"So much of it is filthy and boring and miserable, so like a football match with the side-issues of a seaside hotel, that it is difficult to realize that one is taking part in an historical event."

"The whole atmosphere of the town, with its foreigners and spies, its rumors and counter-rumors, was beastly; it was a sort of armed truce, with everyone watching his neighbor for a slip."

"History can be falsified, but so long as I am alive and my faculties are unimpaired I will never forget that I saw frontline troops equipped with telescopes cut out of cardboard."

"Every line of it is written from a subjective point of view... I warn every reader to put my book down if he wants a coolly balanced 'impartial' history of the Spanish war."

"Of knights, of ladies, loves and feats of arms, / Of courteous acts, of valiant combats I sing."

"What does not love? or rather, what can not / This tyrant love, that brings the world to naught?"

"All human things are subject to decay, / And when fate summons, monarchs must obey."

"Search for the moon, if any would explore / Where vanish all things lost on earthly shore."

"O great in arms, and nobler far in mind, / Whose equal never mortal shall find."

"O damned lust, what woes dost thou devise, / What blinding scales o'erturn our mortal eyes!"

"I set apart this day for solemn prayer with fasting. In the morning I was very cold and dead in my spirit, but the Lord helped me afterwards."

"The judgments of God are abroad in the world: In New England, God is testifying against us by sickness, and by Indians, and by our divisions."

"Read over the greatest part of the Greek Testament. Oh, how much do I miss of what I might attain unto in regard to learning and knowledge!"

"This day a church meeting was held. There had been sinful contentions among them. I exhorted them to love and peace, and God was pleased to melt their hearts."

"I dreamed that I was preaching with much liberty and presence of God. Woke up with my heart much affected with the things of another world."

"It is a day of prayer throughout the colony. Oh, that New England might remember from whence she is fallen, and repent, and do her first works!"

"The principal object of my journey was to circulate the scriptures among the Spanish peasantry, a class of people hitherto almost entirely neglected."

"There is no country in the world where religious animosity is more fierce than in Spain, yet there is none where the people are more ignorant of the real nature of religion."

"The Gitanos or Czechs of Spain are a mysterious race, living on the outskirts of society, speaking a language peculiar to themselves, and acknowledging no laws save those of their own tribe."